Comment by radu_floricica | Hacker News Reader

Comment by radu_floricica | Hacker News Reader

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I'm probably part of the contingent you're alluding to. I'm not cheering. I am however a lot less likely to be depressed, mostly because whenever I tried to fact check a doom-like piece of news, I found it failing, hard. So now I'm at a "once every three months" rotation - which will of course change the first time I manage to confirm a piece of news.

I am moderately pessimistic about the state of research because I do hear things I don't like, but this is compensated by my belief that US academia has a ridiculous amount of institutional entropy, and I'm perfectly willing with temporary issues if this means at least some of the long term problems will be improved. So overall... cautiously optimistic? Long term at least. Is that cheering?

And since the grandparent also mentioned visas - here at least I have a pretty simple opinion. Congress should step up and reform immigration laws. They've avoided doing this for decades, and it's kinda useless to put the blame anywhere else. (for context I'm not american, and my country just had the visa waiver canceled this year by the current administration, so I'm actually on the other side of the fence).

US academia has a ridiculous amount of institutional entropy” — I wouldn’t count on that saving it. These institutions aren’t built for a top-down attack on the very core of how they operate. They’ve spent decades aligning to how grants are funded, how programs are run, how collaboration works. Now the government has blown that up — and done it in such a sloppy, unpredictable way that the institutions don’t even know how to react.

>I am moderately pessimistic about the state of research because I do hear things I don't like, but this is compensated by my belief that US academia has a ridiculous amount of institutional entropy, and I'm perfectly willing with temporary issues if this means at least some of the long term problems will be improved

I am confused how 'burn it all down' will solve any problems, let alone long term ones.

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how innovation works. The 'deal' of basic science in the US is that the government funds broadly and without prejudice. Topics are decided by experts and overseen by experts. These experts are taking large pay-cuts (compared to their worth in industry) to have the freedom to investigate their own interests. In return the public gets a vast amount of R&D on the cheap, much of which doesn't seem to have immediate ROI, but as we well know, has tremendous long term ROI.

Yes sometimes those ideas are dead-ends or don't replicate. Yes sometimes fraud/plagiarism happens. Yes sometimes people research minorities or marginalized people. Certain interests have made some people believe that these are symptoms of a broken system when in reality they are all just parts of the scientific process and freedom of thought. These interests mostly have used culture war issues as a wedge to defund science broadly.

So no, we should not destroy tomorrows cancer treatment (which could save you or the ones you love) because some tech-oligarch wants more money/power.

You quoted my comment, but you don't seem to be responding to it? I don't think I mentioned any burning it all down, nor anything you responded to, really.

Your 'pessimism' towards academia is the justification the 'burn it all down' people are using to ... burn it all down.

I'm not exaggerating. The innovation machine is currently ablaze. Even funded grants for things like cancer and alzheimers aren't being paid out because they fired all the grants processors. Multiple whole universities have been defunded entirely. An entire generation of scientists will have their careers stolen from them if this continues.

I'm an academic. I am of the mind that the whole system has been upended and we'll be lucky if we're making any progress towards research in two years. Part of me thinks we're in a lame duck situation for the NSF and NIH.

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