How the United States Gave Up Being a Science Superpower | Hacker News Reader

How the United States Gave Up Being a Science Superpower

steveblank.com

87 pointsenescakir38 comments

> No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...

It's by design.

Aand of course this submission gets flagged.

We need another Bell Labs where people can experiment without immediate monetization. Look at the history of lasers and such. Took decades but now we have femto pulse lasers for Lasik and such.

Google just did that with LLMs and decided (with the endless layoffs) that they would not continue "subsidizing" their competitors.

Please unflag this post. Steve Blank is an extreme moderate in the sense that he is non-political. So is this post. It is laying out an uncomfortable truth that impacts hackers in the US and everywhere. The simple facts is, our startup culture is under attack by the current administration. Should this attack be successful, we will no longer have startups, because without scientific research from US universities, supported by public grants, we will no longer have round A/B/C. It's game over for YCombinator and hacker culture in the US. We will all need to move to China. Sound extreme? It's not.

Why on earth would this submission be flagged? Mods, if you're watching, please unflag this post.

Professionalization and high employee debt means that the employees will choose sel-prezervation over creative inquiry and truth seeking.

Carring on with this too blantly and over time, it seems self-undermining.

I'd guess Science died the day it was born as "Science". So being a Science superpower really means being a gatekeeping Science-containment Superpower. Antiscience?

Exactly. When the average house in urban areas started being around $1M... There is no more truth seeking.

This saddens me greatly.

I think to certain people, this is viewed as a necessary trade-off to curb the political power and influence of the so-called "Professional Managerial Class" in the United States, due to fears that a version of James Burnham's prediction[1] would come true. When this discourse comes up on sites like Twitter, and people ask why we're doing it, supporters of these cuts ultimately lay the blame at the feet of two camps: Campus protesters and the response to COVID (Masking, vaccine mandates, etc). I think for some people, those things were so traumatic the entire system needed to be torn down. I think the former is mostly harmless and the latter was necessary, but the faction in power doesn't see things that way - and the dissolution of scientific power in the US is how they're going to feel secure again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Managerial_Revolution

Does the book describe how there's a professional managerial class that took over higher education inflating its costs, degrading its services, undermining its ideals, watering down it's standards?

Colleges need to get back to their mission and ditch the sports, drinking, non-academic facilities. Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.

No standards or research if NSF and NIST are gutted.

And dare I add to your points - actually fail students when their standard of work is not good enough? There seems to be no repercussions regarding poor quality work in the current MBA/business management undergrad space (I only speak to these, as I familiar with them) with an attitude of (actively enabled by colleges) pass entitlement and grade inflation from the students.

How is cutting cancer research funding going to produce more a robust and academically rigorous MBA program?

The correlation seems to work the other way, based on MBA program rankings: https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-sc...

> Colleges need to get back to their mission and ditch the sports, drinking, non-academic facilities. Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.

Can you explain how cutting research funding achieve these goal? Especially since many of the schools most impacted by these cuts are very much not party or college sports schools.

Those most impacted are R1 schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_...

Cutting administration achieves these goals. (It's not the skyrocketing number of tenured professors that is driving college costs.)

Now, do you have to cut research in order to cut administration? Research takes a lot of administration, but that should be paid for by the research, not by the students.

It seems like capping indirect rates achieves the goal of defunding administrative bloat while preserving funding to the actual research?

No. Indirect costs on grants aren't some slush fund used to fund whatever but are real costs involved in doing science. It costs money to build lab facilities, maintain and repair lab equipment, pay salaries of support staff like IT folks and lab techs. If indirect costs get capped, more of the actual grant will have be used for these things and less science will get done.

Included in this overhead is administrative staff salaries and administration's facilities that researchers themselves have no control over. That's all spending controlled by research administrators and the institutions administrative layers that control research including decisions about who they hire for administrative roles and various aspects of strategic planning.

It’s the rotten bureaucracy (bloated administration) in academia that results in the symptoms of non academic spending. The root cause is the management that is not allocating resources to the core mission and instead focusing on administrative costs (salaries), and expensive facilities that aren’t academically necessary.

You don’t get the professional managerial class investing in world class research labs, they spend more on sports!

>> Does the book describe how there's a professional managerial class that took over higher education inflating its costs, degrading its services, undermining its ideals, watering down it's standards?

>> Colleges need to get back to their mission and ditch the sports, drinking, non-academic facilities. Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.

> Can you explain how cutting research funding achieve these goal?

It doesn't, but I think there's a real connection there. The cutting funding is a backlash, and the correct response to that is to change to achieve a more secure societal position that doesn't invite a backlash. The current cuts to research funding are the direct result of universities allowing themselves to become identified as elements of a particular political faction. But the universities have been weakened and have few allies to call on, because they're now widely perceived to be expensive rip-offs, etc.

> Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.

That's not really what the current Trump/GOP/Desantis policy, if you could call it that, is about.

It's about weaponizing funding to exert direct government control on what is taught and how it operates. Government approved speech only.

The current admin's letter to Harvard demanded governmenr direct control over department operation, course materials and teaching staff

They pitch this to thir base as revenge on "woke", because they've primed their base, the majority of whom have never attended college, or have not stepped foot on a campus in decades, to distrust educational institutions.

Drinking has been an integral part of universities for a long, long time.

I think the trauma argument is spot on here. The pandemic exposed the tenuous nature of the system we all exist in and for many that was simply too much. It is a deeply disconcerting thing to really sit with the knowledge that we depend upon systems so complex that no single person can fix or manage or describe them and that small perturbations can cause damage that is visible to everyone.

When that was all laid bare during the pandemic the reaction was to demand that "we" take back the power to control the system. For some this meant quietly covering the system back up, for others it means tearing it down and rebuilding it.

Of course that isn't to excuse the system, or blame the trauma. Traumatic reactions to mass death, dislocation, and disruption are expected. The system is also very far from perfect. However typically rational and effective solutions don't come from responses like we're seeing.

And we never really mourned the deaths of the people that died of covid so far collectively. I still find this weird.

There are plenty of real issues with higher education, but the attacks on research are using protests and other things as a fig leaf.

We've seen this movie before, when Germany destroyed the world's leading research university system in the name of control and ideology. Most people would not want to repeat that, while it seems some in power feel differently.

> while it seems some in power feel differently.

They have so much money they dont think anything can ever happen to them save for having their money taken away by some boogeyman. Everything else is a problem for the poors.

You do know the "current admin" is the managerial class right? It's just a different faction of it.

> the response to COVID (Masking, vaccine mandates, etc) This is something which I find quite saddening. The ire seemed to be directed at "scientists". The funny/sad part happens whenever you try to concede and say - Lets concede that scientists were wrong. How was the handling from POTUS at that time? People start getting into whataboutism. The most sad part is that they think POTUS is simultaneously responsible for Project Warp Speed and also that fast approval made the vaccine suspect.

As the US is being torn down for fun and profit it seems like I've seen Vannevar Bush's name pop up more and more frequently.

It seems that this dude had a huge influence on the shape of our society.

> Researchers mustn’t be complacent. They must communicate the difference between eliminating ideologically objectionable programmes and undermining the entire research ecosystem.

This is a weird statement. Researchers -- everyone, really -- must communicate that eliminating whole areas of research because the current administration deems them "ideologically objectionable" is suicidal. What is this, a dictatorship?

A dumb populace is way easier to direct into self-destruction for profit, so why would we value knowledge?

The Manhattan Project is the most important example of the power that can be achieved through collaborative work between the private sector and the government. It allowed us to win the war and surpass Hitler's scientists. All thanks to Roosevelt's understanding of the letter from Einstein, Szilard, Teller & Wigner.

The Manhattan Project was not how the war against Hitler was won. I'd say it factored very little, if at all, in the European theater of war.

It was also not how the war against Japan was won, that was merely the coup d'grace against an already defeated Japan (in American storytelling, it was also a way to minimize casualties during the last moments of the war; this view isn't widely held in the rest of the world though).

Bienvenue en France !

Right, because scientific funding in Europe magically appears out of nowhere amid record defense spending.

Much of the best science ever done was done in a military context.

Very true, among them: - Nuclear energy - Internet & GPS - Numerous medical advancements (rapid medical response techniques, advanced trauma care, etc.)

It's a dual-edged sword.

> sword

I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but I bet a fair bit of metallurgy was learned producing a better sword.

Jobless climate and gender scientists just refuse to stop stirring up and start learning a trade...

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