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Comment by cmiles8 | Hacker News Reader

Same issue with grad school… the value isn’t there for this to make sense. Folks are better off just going right into them private sector.

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The value absolutely is there. The NSF and NIH were both very cheap and have had huge ROI. The cuts to academic funding have been monumentally stupid.

Brass tacks, if an institution has an overwhelming political leaning toward faction X and works to undermine faction Y, is it really surprising that when Y gets into power it attempts to damage the institution? This is precisely why publicly funded institutions should maintain agnostic political posture.

What fantasy world do you live in? I want to be there, the world I'm everything granted to the public is always under constant attack and threatened to be destroyed and their proponents destroy and their benefactors humiliated.

How do you do this when belief in science, which is important to academic institutions, is unpopular with one faction?

When it no longer becomes science and becomes social. There are MANY examples, even in this thread, of this happening.

When and where did this happen before a year and half ago?

I mean, is it political when you write a paper that concludes that vaccines are effective or that fish die when streams are polluted?

The answer seems to have become "yes", so this is a rhetorical question, but ideally _information_ would be apolitical.

We also see the current administration politicizing things like the federal reserve, which has tried VERY hard to be apolitical.

Well there's absolutely the value in a lot of what those PI's teams are doing, what there is no longer is the political will to invest in those endeavors.

I think longer term this will mean we start to see a kind of "rise" of places like TUM and Tsinghua. (If that could even be seen as a "rise" at this point? Pretty sure most people already acknowledge their primacy.) At root, MIT was only MIT because of the teams it could collect together. If it can't do that anymore, I don't think people stop putting those teams together, those teams just stop being put together at MIT.

The search for fundamental clarity in humanity's great aporias will continue. Just a speedbump.

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