NSF plans end to lone U.S. Antarctic research icebreaker
science.org
science.org
If you want scientific research as you know it to persist in the United States, please take a moment to help support for science in Congress go viral in your community.
Empirical science is non-partisan. It is good and helpful to know what's true.
If your friends are devout readers of the bible, point 'em toward Philippians 4:8. While I'm not religious, that passage has resonated for me my entire life.
Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
Who would ever work again for any research in any science that relies on government cooperation in the US?
Only all of Congress should be able to do these things, we do not have Kings and we don't tolerate Tyrants
How expensive is it to operate?
How many icebreakers does NSF operate?
Is there a US Coast guard icebreaker under construction?
Lots of generic "they're sabotaging science! We're doomed!" around here.
Sorry, just asking all the other missing questions. Carry on with the hysteria.
Incompetence (we didn't think about this out loud), or malice (we didn't want to leave a paper trail)?
Consider the video "Staffing an Office" where Jeff Small, a former advisor in the Department of the Interior says “When you work for the federal government everything you put in an email, text, or note is FOIAable and releasable to the American people. At interior, we had a ton of in person meetings which allowed us to speak a little more freely about the topics of the day.”
Or the video "Advancing the President’s Agenda" where former OPM director Donald Devine says "You need to keep your agenda pretty close. You got to be careful who you tell it to because if you run it through a normal process…it’s going to be in the paper tomorrow..."
It's pretty clear that the architects of our current executive branch want to keep their objectives out of the public record and out of the press. So let's go with malice.
Source: Snowden. It only got worse from there.
Dude, every single government ever in the history of humanity works this way. The appointed administrators of ancient rome were scheming up ways to serve their benefactors without leaving a tablet trail that their benefactors opponents could complain about. When I worked for a podunk state department of a well run solidly blue state 15yr ago we did this. There were meetings with no agenda where they'd verbally go over what the new boss's (appointed positions at top of department, not the governor himself) inclinations were on areas of policy relevant to the department and there would be discussion about how to align to that. And this wasn't people who reported to the boss, these were line level workers and middle managers. This wasn't coming from the top down. This was the bottom simply knowing what was good for it.
And just to be clear, just because it's always like this doesn't mean you shouldn't hate it and hate them for doing it.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/house-panel-takes-fa...
Now that he's president, here come the reprisals. Zero out NSF's funding, shut down NPR, end the COVID era break on student loan enforcement, withdraw grants from Harvard.
Is he wrong?
Of course he’ll be dead before the real multi-generational consequences take effect.
Despite posturing by some academic administrators, most folks have no social agenda for a country they recently immigrated to.
The fundamental problem is that scientists stopped thinking of themselves as public servants, and started thinking of themselves as lecturers whose job it is to scold the public. They stopped working to follow the evidence wherever it lead, and switched to promoting trendy ideologies. Remember during COVID how we were all supposed to isolate, until the Floyd protests started and suddenly the need for isolation disappeared?
"Three-in-four liberal faculty support mandatory diversity statements while 90% of conservative faculty and 56% of moderate faculty see them as political litmus tests."
...
"For decades, college and university faculty have identified as predominantly left-leaning (e.g., affiliating with the Democratic party, self-identifying as liberal), a skew that has become more pronounced over the past three decades.[40] For instance, in the Higher Education Research Institute’s 1990 faculty survey, 6% identified as “far left,” 16% identified as “conservative,” and 0.4% identified as “far right.” In 2020 these percentages were 12%, 10%, and 0.2%, respectively.[41] College students are also predominantly left-leaning, though the rate is closer to 2:1 left vs. right, compared to 6:1 among faculty.[42]"
..."significant portions of faculty say that they would discriminate against colleagues with different ideological views in professional settings (e.g., during anonymous peer-review) or during day-to-day social interactions.[43]"
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/academic-mind-2022-wh...
Now consider that self-described "conservatives" significantly outnumber self-described "liberals" in the US electorate: https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-stead...
Academics successfully hacked away the branch that they themselves were standing on. Large fractions of the US electorate no longer believe that the research these academics do is a good-faith attempt to advance their interests as voters and taxpayers. And so they're not interested in funding it. Fair play if you ask me. If academia wants funding, it should do deep reforms in order to re-earn the trust of voters.
Further more saying things like "It is your fault that you are in front of my fist" is not productive. Being antiscience is the problem here not being antileft.
Now if they try to assert power over me. That is a different. That is why you need to make lobbying laws more effective.
Not a hard line. Scientific papers often comment on the best public policies. It matters a lot to taxpayers if institutional characteristics mean that these papers will inevitably recommend left-wing policies.
Why would right-wingers want their tax dollars going to institutes that will just recommend left-wing policies and call it "science", without the sort of rigorous debate that true science requires?
>Being antiscience is the problem here not being antileft.
If scholars are following the evidence where it leads, it should be easy to give examples of them recommending right-wing policies. How many recent examples can you give of this?
Feynman said: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that."
He talks about the need for utter honesty, leaning over backwards.
"For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9377486-that-is-the-idea-th...
When people call themselves "scientists", yet neglect these principles, they aren't doing science. They're cloaking their ideology in the guise of science.
See this article for an in-depth investigation of how this happens in modern academia: https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/woke-academics-are-riggi...
Just because it happens in a university building, and calls itself "science", doesn't make it true science. Any more than the fact that Scientology has "science" in the name makes it true science.
"Trust the Science" and "Nullius in verba" (motto of the Royal Society) have practically opposite meanings. One of them is actual science; the other is a cargo cult which grants itself unearned credibility through use of the term "science".
The point is antiscience, and the right wingers need an enemy and they are turning to antiscience to do it. It is funny since you are citing FIRE I am pretty sure they will say similar stuff, I am guessing with words like "chilling effect" to describe parts the politics.
My view on the whole "it is woke" is that it is first of all an attempt of trying to construct a boogey man instead of having am honest debate. Most of what is called woke is actually just opinions. I have always seen the "it is woke" crowd as an attack on all of academia, that discussion can never be diverse enough to be anything that an out right attack.
Now we are slashing vital science projects that has nothing to do with woke, and people are arguing "science" should be blamed because someone was woke.
I am sure we think the same on many of these issues, but "Trust the science" is more or less what the Royal society said. In the end it does not matter if you are a scientist we as a people trust stories and legends more, creating monsters from thin air is a powerfull tool if you want people to trust you.
A lot of the hand wringing by academics themselves are unfocused but circling the root cause, which is this. I would prefer corporations fund research but directed through the university system. The patents and gains are then funneled through the corporations that funded it, rather than the academics and universities with zero return to the taxpayers other than abstract “society gains” pablum, when the academics and universities truly gain all the profit.
When corporations that actually have a market test and profit motive are funding the research, avenues that are unlikely to succeed will be cut off sooner, and alternatives to the current vogue will be funded quicker. You can see a real-life example (of failure) in Alzheimer’s research which was hamstrung by decades of political control of research labs and taxpayer grants that refused to fund alternatives to the “mainstream” theories which set back society and the disease.
You asked for the justification and I provided it
It's hard to see how your suggestion would work for fundamental advances in technology. For example, backpropagation took decades to move from an idea to industrial use. [0] It was also "invented" multiple times.
This typifies the quality of discourse around defunding of "The Science" at HN.
In a vacuum, maybe. But if China is subsidising basic research, it doesn’t make sense for private enterprise to do it here. That technology base shifts to where its cost of capital is lowest.
This is practically how America ascended—putting massive public resources behind emerging science and technology before the fractured powers of Europe gathered the conviction to.
It doesn’t even take imagination to see the fruits of this philosophy. There are countries whose governments don’t spend on R&D. Their citizens are poor and unfree, their governments less than sovereign on the international stage.
> there is no return to the taxpayer for the funding
The return comes from taxing the growth the R&D enables. Silicon Valley has more than returned the military funding that kickstarted it.
If the state has cancelled research for 'impure' political motives, how would we know that it hasn't directed state research (and outcomes) for similarly impure political reasons?
There's an interesting contradiction in the popular discourse here at HN. The government is simultaneously characterized as unable to make the correct decisions and at the same time, characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research. These two themes seem contradictory.
If they cannot make the "right" decisions or lack competence in leadership, it wouldn't be unreasonable to doubt the efficacy of their research leadership. How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?
If their leadership is competent, if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why do proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?
Appeals to the status quo of state funded research as the only or best way to achieve outcomes requires a better argument. At best, I think you might offer arguments via pragmatism. It would be reasonable to expect that purely voluntarily funded research would produce different outcomes. As these pursuits would generally be directed towards creating positive economic outcomes, rather than political or ideological ones, we might also expect that these outcomes would be better along the metric of economic value. Politically funded research could reasonably be expected to better at achieving political or ideological outcomes.
However, these are arguments from principle. We would need to test it empirically for those caught in the Scientismic paradigm to accept the results. Under this model of argument, the existence of state funded research tampers with the results. We wouldn't know how a voluntarily funded research regime would function when competing state funds are polluting the pool. Researchers may find it easier to pursue state backed projects than pursue projects which would appeal to the value creation process. This is just one of the flaws in the argumentum ad antiquitatem approach.
Public funding does not require centralization. While the American style of governance is top-heavy, the EU is less centralized, with most resources at the state level. Each state has its own agencies for funding research, and together they distribute much more funding than EU-level agencies.
There are also plenty of private organizations funding basic research. European elites have traditionally found it prestigious to support arts and sciences, and hence there are many private foundations funding research. While some elements of that culture made it to the US, it's not as strong there as it is in Europe. Instead, rich Americans prefer direct donations to universities, which often use the money for buildings and student amenities.
In other words, American universities rely more on central sources of research funding, as the states are less capable and private entities less interested than in Europe.
Plenty, of course.
> If so, why is state directed research a special case?
It's not a "special case", but rather there does not seem to be a better way to allocate significant resources for scientific research than governmental funding. Thus, the decision is either to accept that there will be some misallocation from centralized funding (while working to mitigate those inefficiencies), or to give up doing most fundamental research.
Also note that government funding of research is "additive" to an otherwise default-open system - independent actors can always fund research they'd like to see. Whereas most of the time we bemoan central planning we're talking about closed dynamics from which there is no opt-out. If privately funded research were generally lucrative, then we would see much more of it. But outside of some very specific contexts (straightforward patentability, prospects of immediate commercialization, subjects adjacent to highly lucrative centralized industries (which is closer to government funding than not)), we don't.
In general markets are not supercomputational - markets are merely one heuristic that works well for some things and terribly for others. If we were talking about say how many gas or electric vehicle charging stations to build and where, that's something that is decently handled decently by private investment. But an endeavor where the gains from discoveries will end up distributed and a private investor can't reap most rewards from their investment won't be.
I think many people have concluded that the marginal ROI is negative or the system environment is prohibitively inefficient.
Your argument would be appropriate if we were debating the amount of spending in the context of other spending, or relative to itself. But in isolation as some heuristic it's "not even wrong". The larger context is this same movement blindly destroying our scientific research institutions also just added $5T of new debt, with a large chunk of that being spent on nothing more than a spectacle of performative cruelty (ICE).
And so I have to ask - do you really want to be making an argument in support of indulging the mob in their desire to see people hurt instead of actually advancing as a species?
Thats what I'm talking about. Im not talking about the merits of a movement or mob.
Do you think the underlying reality of ROI is irrelevant? Do you support "advancement" at all or any cost?
I obviously do not support "advancement" at any [large] cost. But it's fallacious to extrapolate from that to not supporting it at any [small] cost, as the thrust of your argument implies.
>it seems plausible that there are diminishing returns to fundamental research, and that those returns are conditional on the funding system environment. I think many people have concluded that the marginal ROI is negative or the system environment is prohibitively inefficient.
Obviously nobody supports any specific thing at any cost, yet you are still asking this question rhetorically. The implication is the inverse whereby the cost is already too high - without actually substantiating this argument.
Thus the main part of my comment asking what you're actually seeing this cost in terms of, which you didn't respond to. Focusing on merely the monetary cost would be utterly fallacious in the context of this spendthrift administration.
As mentioned above, I am not talking about the motives of this administration, which you keep coming back to as if it is relevant.
I'm discussing cost in terms of money.
Or for a financial example closer to the subject - if I'm incensed by the overgrown and out of control NSA/DEA/ATF, extrapolate to harping on the need for less government in general, but then my arguments get taken up and only used to attack less hardened public-good-providing agencies like NPS and USPS - I haven't actually succeeded at my original goal! Rather my ideals have been abused to by people who don't actually care about my ideals, aren't looking to increase individual liberty, and merely want to destroy NPS and USPS - likely to focus on growing the type of agencies that I originally started off against!
As such, the motives of people actually carrying out the actions are highly relevant, and this is exactly why I keep coming back to discussing these motives. If the reasoning here is actually about money, we would expect to see reductions in costs across the board, perhaps some unevenness based on priorities, but still with the biggest cuts being on the biggest expenditures. However instead, we see $5T in new debt (monetary inflation), and increased wasteful spending on many things. Their goals are clearly not about fiscal responsibility.
So then if we're espousing an ideal of fiscal responsibility, it behooves us to condemn and distance ourselves from this administration. First, because they're burning the credibility of our lofty ideal rather than using it to create reasonable solutions in good faith. Second, because if they're cutting things based on a different metric than efficiently spending public funds, it actually means that public funds are then being spent less efficiently - so we're actually going backwards.
It seems you only want to talk about trump and their goal. If you see it as impossible to separate the topic from politics, even after sufficient disclaimers, then there isnt anything to discuss.
I dont see some obscure and transient conversation in a forum backwater as meaningful political action. There are no stakes.
To the extent there are policy implications, I would like to define a preferred policy position on a specific issue. I already know my position on $5T of additional debt. What is the point of talking about it?
Rather it's about people reading each others' opinions and continuing to placate themselves with thoughts that these actions are anything resembling reform or serving the general interests of our country.
Policy positions don't exist in isolation - their actual effects depend on other policies. Even if everything you yourself advocate for would work well together, this does not mean all of your desired policies will be taken up as a whole (similar dynamic of my comment two back). Furthermore the specifics of a big-name policy depend on the people implementing those policies, which is why I keep coming back to the motivations of the current gang.
Cut funding to scientific research by half, with the goal that private industry will take up topics adjacent to it (semiconductors, computing, drug research, etc), while significantly shrinking the tax/inflation burden by generally downsizing the government? Maybe plausible. Cut funding to scientific research by half indiscriminately while stifling domestic industry with hefty import taxes and raising taxflation? Once again, it doesn't seem like the goal is reform to further our national interests - regardless of one's political framework.
But even modulo other policies, what do you see as the point of say coming up with the perfect nuanced plan how to reform the public system of scientific funding? The system of last year no longer exists. Today's system won't exist in a few months. Maybe we can talk about how best to pick up the pieces and rebuild when the butchers are gone, but even just thinking we know where the bottom will be is hopeful.
I would entertain arguments for situations where huge amounts of taxpayer dollars might be required because the private sector doesn’t show up. But the bar has to be way, way higher than it has been.
Look I get it those with good incomes in America want to pay less taxes because they can take care of themselves.
Science has been a big part of the US dominant lead but I think it is quite a stretch to say it is how America ascended. Historically it is better case that America ascended through industrial and commercial might which led to the victory in WW2 (in which the nuclear bomb was a small footnote in reality--much more important after).
The growth gains are how the funding produces an eventual return but this is increasingly globalised (i.e. there is not always a particular gain to Americans). Some company in Europe might be the one which wins the market, giving everyone lower prices but only the european taxpayer a special gain. There is a kind of tragedy of commons here. Science is probably advanced the most when there is a dominant industrial commercialising power which foots the bill?
We ascended remarkably similarly to how China is. Stealing IP from the old powers, giving it room and state support to scale and then staying out of nonsense wars.
Maybe I should move to lalaland too. It sounds nice there.
Back in reality, American economic and military supremacy was founded on Government funding fundamental research and industry using it to create unprecedented growth in wealth and quality of life for mot people in the form of jobs. China has figured it out, and they are forging ahead. America is heading back to the middle ages.
So much for the invisible hand of the market.
The base wants to see spending cuts in exchange for the tax cuts the rich are getting, and thinks science (especially climate science!) is a blunt tool by which liberals berate and control them.
Looking at the US is looking at making Cyberpunk real. If you're not rich your vote doesn't matter you are just a useful idiot.