Let me be clear: This is precisely about sides and ideologies.
Its really on the nose when these two examples has been anything but fundamental. There are many people out there that don't believe these things are worth working towards.
In lieu of a thorough argument I'll post this old clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xcQIoh3FQQ
Like nobody enjoys giving up more than half of their grants to the school admin. But cutting it down 15% max all of a sudden is not a change that is going to stick around.
What is the serious path to fixing them? I don't think academics are moving the needle with their current strat of a bit of handwringing followed by conceding to the system anyway.
Replication problems—I guess this is sort of a social problem really, it isn’t seen as prestigious to just try and replicate research. Maybe we should start to hand out more grants for that (we get what we pay for, right?). Perhaps this could also help with “publish or perish,” we could stop using paper published as a figure of merit and start using number of papers reproduced. I would put this in the bucket of insufficient diligence applied by the grant issuers.
Overproduction of PhDs, I dunno, if lots of people want to go into research I don’t see that as a huge problem.
Rather than overproduction of PhDs, perhaps we have a problem of seeing grad students as cheap labor. I think it is widely understood that the hours that grad students bill are almost entirely bullshit (you spend way more time doing anything than your contract says), so maybe we need to police that better (it seems like the grad students’ and the NSF could easily have aligned interests here, in terms of making sure grad students get paid more). Pay them more, the university will have to employ fewer. However, we’ll probably need to hire more dedicated instructors at that point.
But, "replication crisis" is a misnomer. The problem isn't replication, not really. A better name would be the scientific validity crisis. This comes up in every HN discussion of science and academia so I wrote a full explanation of why here:
https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science...
... but tl;dr many papers that are scientifically invalid will replicate just fine. Even if academics suddenly started directing funding to replication studies on a huge scale, nothing would change and there would be no surge in trust in science.
I'm not a software developer, but companies have made an effort to hire self taught programmers who don't have college degrees. That seems like a good thing. But of course demand has its ups and downs, and we might be in a "down" period right now.
I'm thinking out loud here because I don't have an easy answer. For myself, I don't regret my education.
Still, private sector hiring is often more flexible than it looks. The stated requirements are just a way to filter out applications, but the hiring for important roles is done using networks.
In the past I designed the hiring process at a fintech startup selling into banking and insurance; a common refrain from our customers was "we just can't build a team of your quality". I hadn't done anything special there, just applied normal tech industry hiring processes, but those were hardly known amongst our customer base. I actually had one guy asked me in wild-eyed amazement, "is it really true you ask candidates to do the work in the interview itself?!?".
A lot of the hiring-is-broken crowd are upset because they got rejected, possibly as a false negative. That really sucks, I'd hate it too if I had experienced that. But it's a view based on personal experience, not on a cold-eyed evaluation of results vs other industries that use different hiring processes. There's a reason that we have a notion of a 'tech company' even though all companies use technology, and there's a reason other industries are scared of them. A lot boils down to different cultural approaches of hiring.
How so? It is, I suppose, pushing an ideology that everyone should support education, research, clean air, and safe roads, but any belief in some sort of universal good must rely on an ideology, if only circularly on the ideology that there is such a thing as a universal good.
TFA seems to say "This is important and we shouldn't cut general funding", but also goes on to call on industry, in particular large tech company CEOs to push back against ideologically driven funding cuts. That toes the line of calling for political responses.
The author (and Nature) pretends like those aren't real problems and that scientists should get unconditional support. That's never been the case.
There are currently existing ideologies in power in some countries (e.g. in Argentina, not everything is about the US!) that stand for de-funding health, education and basic science and research, and anything that is not of immediate use for businesses. It's a self-defeating ideology (because business do benefit from basic research in the long term), but it does exist today.
Another good argument against our subsidy of education (although maybe not against research) is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
I don't really agree, and I am surprised there are people here who would argue against funding research.
What's actually happening is that most of the wealth and tax revenue is generated by the coastal metropolitan areas of the US, which basically subsidize the rural inland regions of the country. Things like Medicare which those same rural folks vote against. This is because the amount of wealth generated by science and technology vastly outweighs what is being generated by rural areas of the country.
Now we cut off the pipeline and investment into those wealth generating areas so that long term, the nation will head into decline...
The correct solution is to tax the disproportionately wealthy oligarchs of those coastal vampire companies... the tech monopolies which implicitly levy taxes on all online transactions (Google's 30% cut on android apps, Google's 70% cut on all advertising, Steam's 30% cut on all PC games, Amazon's cut on all online shopping transactions), then reinvest that money into rural industries to make manufacturing competitive. Instead the solution has been to levy a tax on all consumers over all trade, which tends to make local manufacturing less competitive over the long run.
You see this in both Russia and the United States, where these rural and ethnic minority areas of seem to gladly send their children off to war. Liberals like to think this is some sort of quasi-genocidal policy when it applies to the Buryats or the Tuvans, but if you watch the videos of the guys shipping off to war, their happy and smiling.
They are happy because they are getting a paycheck! Same deal with illegal immigration in the United States. Christian values are to "do unto others as you would have done to yourself", but Christian conservatives all vote to brutalize immigrants and cut social services (which are all subsidized by California anyways!). Why is this?
It's because going to war is a way to get a paycheck in an arguably less shameful way than living off the dole, and kicking illegal immigrants out is kicking out the competition for low wage jobs.
People absolutely are voting for their wallets, but in such a way that they don't live with the shame of taking handouts.
Presumably this is in reference to the years 1993-1995, 2009-2011, and 2021-2023...? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divided_government_in_the_Unit...
> recently in some places it has been blatantly about ideologies
I agree if we use the word "ideology" in an absolute, philosophical sense, but I think this it's missing the authors point entirely. To illustrate with a more familiar term: basically every part of social life is technically political, but when people say 'this isn't about politics', they're trying to communicate that it doesn't relate to the actively-debated divisions of the day among elected officials. US prosperity is something that no side will own up to opposing, and yet here we are, dismantling our soft power in the academic sphere and beyond at a breakneck pace.
I think what we're seeing is that there is obviously a need to rein in some of those corporate excesses you're alluding to, and try to protect the research core that we need to move the nation, and humanity in general, forward.