US science is being wrecked | Hacker News Reader

US science is being wrecked

arstechnica.com

59 pointsxqcgrek239 comments

I think if you're against these cuts you also have to be open to finding out which of these historical investments have a good rate of return. I.e. which is more important, tax dollars spent finding out the composition of Mars rocks or spent on fusion energy?

In the spirit of good science and as a happy taxpayer for the cause of these organizations, we should still be open to their scrutiny. A simple question we should ask, after all we're good scientists, is whether these groups are at their appropriate funding-to-success level or not, particularly in an era of a spiraling debt crisis.

If we predicate what things are worth studying based on expected monetary returns, then we've put a stake through the heart of scientific inquiry.

I don’t find this compelling, especially given the enormity of the replication crisis and misconduct in academia. If scientific institutions want less budgetary scrutiny and more freedom, they need to be fundamentally trustworthy, but the past decade has made it amply clear that is not the case.

More rigor around funding isn’t putting a stake through the heart of scientific inquiry; fabricating data is.

I was responding to the idea that science funding should be predicated on expected ROI. That strikes at the heart of inquiry for a couple of reasons. First, that the point of scientific inquiry is to try to explain the universe, not to generate returns. That it generates returns is a happy side-effect. Second, because we rarely know in advance what sorts of study will or will not generate returns. It is quite common that research that has no obvious benefit up front results in a surprising benefit or laying the foundation for such benefits through later research.

I agree with you that fabricating data is bad (who would argue with that?), but that's an entirely different topic.

Its quite simple, Gender studies research has a massive negative ROI when you account for the increased surgeries, medication, therapy, and funeral expenses that it causes, promotes, "normalizes" or otherwise makes more common. Queer theory, for example, isn't like NASA creating cordless power tools for the people, or discovering the benefits of grooved pavement for space shuttle landings.

It is eminently clear to anyone with their head on straight that technical research will lead to a positive return overall. You are correct that the specifics about how inventions come about can be random.

Here[1] is a queer theory journal. Let me know if this is going to help us accidentally discover a new industrial process that feeds more people or saves lives in some other way. You don't need to have precognitive abilities to correctly dismiss this drivel and save everyone a headache.

[1] https://interalia.queerstudies.pl/issue-19-2024/artwich/

Given the rather direct connection between Alan Turing dying because he was persecuted for queerness, this seems to be a rather odd angle to argue; there seems to me to quite a bit of evidence that queer studies might significantly reduce things like suicide rates [1].

It's also rather irrelevant: queer studies doesn't get very much funding to begin with. One estimate I found placed research "on sexual and gender minoritized (SGM) populations" at 0.8% of the NIH budget, the majority of which went to HIV related research [2].

Which all really seems to rather disingenuous given that the funding cuts that are currently taking place are across the board: "The funding decreases touch virtually every area of science — extending far beyond the diversity programs and other “woke” targets that the Trump administration says it wants to cut" [3]. This includes massive cuts at NASA, to the point that many current and future missions are in danger of being canceled:

"This would result in the cancellation of a number of high-profile missions and campaigns, according to the new documents. For example, Mars Sample Return — a project to haul home Red Planet material already collected by NASA's Perseverance rover — would get the axe. So would the New Horizons mission, which is exploring the outer solar system after acing its Pluto flyby in July 2015, and Juno, a probe that has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016." [4]

As a result of these cuts we are literally going to know less about Jupiter. And you're off on some weird gender studies tangent.

[1] https://www.columbiapsychiatry.org/news/gender-affirming-car...

[2] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2024....

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/22/upshot/nsf-gr...

[4] https://www.space.com/space-exploration/trumps-2026-budget-w...

> Its quite simple, Gender studies research has a massive negative ROI when you account for the increased surgeries, medication, therapy, and funeral expenses that it causes, promotes, "normalizes" or otherwise makes more common.

That's a lot of words when you could have just said that you're against individualism and personal freedom.

I get that fabricating data and academic integrity look like a different issue from ROI-based funding, but I don’t think they are. In the context of public funding, there must be a justification for the money spent. For a long time, it was “this research will help all of humanity and further our understanding of the universe”, which is great until it turns out that a lot of the research is questionable at best and outright lies at worst. How does made up research help further our understanding of the universe?

So absent institutional integrity, another justification for funding must be found, and one option is ROI. That has its own drawbacks, but at least if we start there we could move back to a place of institutional trust.

The ROI of unknown unknowns is by definition unknown.

I'm always amazed by people who speak fancy econ language like "ROI", economics is an abysmal example of science, it can't predict or solve anything but you're arguing for making it the arbiter of all other sciences? That's going to end as everything econ - in another great depression or war.

The problem is that finance is a model - every model is useful, and every model is wrong. When you optimize for any specific model things inevitably get left behind, and our society has already optimized heavily in the direction of finance.

For an extreme case, take a look at libre software. Giving away freedom destroys most of the ability to be economically compensated for a work. And yet, how many distributed trillions of dollars in value creation has libre software enabled? (I am still using the model here in a hope to better convince you, but there are also plenty of intangibles not captured by the model of dollars, eg the freedom itself)

I'd say that foundational scientific research is in a similar spot. Which means it needs to be evaluated on different metrics - the entire point of these various review committees, boards, etc. And I will certainly agree that they could use some reforms! But we are not talking about reform here, we are talking about wholesale destruction and installation of different-flavored political apparatchiks. So in the context of the original point, it's a bit disingenuous to bring up criticisms that point to the need for reform, as support for the current political winds.

This is over stating the extend of the replication "crisis" (which is a terrible name). The reality is that fraud rates are much lower than in pretty much any other part of society. The irony is also that the problems have increased significantly, because of making scientists constantly having to justify the "monetary value" of their research. It incentives overstaying impact (everyone who's ever written a grant application knows how ridiculous it is, everything is supposed to be high gain/risk, but at the same time you're supposed to already know everything you'll find out and how you will use the results).

> I think if you're against these cuts you also have to be open to ...

Philosophically, that assertion can be made.

Real-world, there are vastly more humans who are against these cuts for mundane reasons than there are devout philosophers.

And our current scientific research establishment is a bloated & self-serving bureaucracy. Which demands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_of_clergy while treating its actual production workers like crap.

And, given human nature, reforming a crappy "X-ology Research Establishment" is far more difficult that deciding on the in-theory relative merits of researching X-ology vs. Y-ology vs. Z-ology.

> In the spirit of good science and as a happy taxpayer for the cause of these organizations, we should still be open to their scrutiny. A simple question we should ask, after all we're good scientists, is whether these groups are at their appropriate funding-to-success level or not, particularly in an era of a spiraling debt crisis.

I agree, in principle. However, this is a trap.

Here’s a playbook:

1. Declare, loudly, that a problem exists. The problem doesn’t have to be real, but it’s better if it is.

2. Announce, even more loudly, that you are going to address the problem in a way that’s suspiciously self serving.

3. Implement your preferred solution as rapidly as possible. The “solution” can be as flawed as you like. It may or may not actually fix the original problem; that part is unimportant.

4. When people react to your implementation, they sort themselves into three buckets: supporters (partisan or otherwise), detractors (partisan or otherwise), and “reasonable people” who “see both sides.”

5. While the “reasonable people” are still debating whether it was a good idea to cure the patient’s brain tumor by decapitation, move on to the next “problem” that needs to be “fixed.”

A well-known (at the time; awareness has probably faded somewhat since) different articulation of this playbook, from an (anonymous) implementor of it in the Bush Administration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

This is already what the funding agencies do! The merit review process solicits outside expert assessment of the importance, feasibility, and potential impact (including economic development and societal impact) of the research, and the funding agencies do their best to maintain a balanced portfolio of research that is promising for advancing national priorities

By all means we should discuss the transparency of this process, what those national priorities are, and exactly what we (collectively as taxpayers) the risk-reward tradeoff should be. But let’s not pretend that the funding agencies don’t already view science as a public investment, or be too hasty about dismissing the potential medium term economic value of research into for example geology and geochemistry on mars

How do you define “success”? Is “return” just in pure economic terms or are we also measuring other benefits to society?

So depressing. Like watching a slow-motion suicide of an entire country.

Slow motion? Looks very fast and direct from here

Well, it's still slower than an actual suicide by an individual. But on a national scale, it's incredibly fast for sure; unprecedented, even.

It's the old " I never used algebra in my job, but I did use things the football coach taught me" mindset.

considering that ~50% of all of our new scientific studies annually don't replicate, its far far worse than you might think.

Any citation for your "exact" claim here??

Reading a few headlines about psychology and extrapolating it out to everything, including hard sciences, most likely.

Ironically, shocking claims about the scope of the replication crisis are themselves difficult to replicate.

Yes, exactly. Medicine is progressing very quickly and I don't understand where these people get this idea that modern science is fake.

We have big and complex problems, sure. Yeah we're taking a stab at more complex issues, like anxiety and depression. Which, might I remind everyone, had a solution of "idk lock them up I guess" until about 40 years ago.

“Ah! I see you’ve got the machine that goes PING!”

https://youtu.be/VQPIdZvoV4g?si=19OCFyMXkpS96RWe

Fascists don’t like science and education in general

This time around they don't even need to burn the books. Just shut off internet access.

The US is over-leveraged and should be making spending cuts. Sorry folks.

Sorry, this is not a good faith argument, just like the rest of the destructionist narrative about "the debt". "The debt" is our currency. Calls to eliminate "the debt" are calls to destroy our currency, ostensibly for the benefit of foreign interests.

The disingenuity is even more glaring when you look at the destructionists' overall budget plan, which has nothing to do with actual fiscal responsibility but instead includes further tax cuts and increased deficit spending. The boosters of the narrative haven't had anything to do with actual fiscal responsibility for decades, but at least the previous goal was merely justifying corporate welfare to domestic banksters as opposed to the plainly anti-American goals of whatever new foreign ownership the Republican party is under these days.

Okay, so why should these cuts, specifically, be made?

And, why are we looking to increase the deficit? Are we really going to sit here and pretend this administration has desire, at all, to address the deficit? How much can we lie before it becomes so blatant it's poison to the human mind?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com