The Current Crisis: What's Happening to Science in America | Hacker News Reader

The Current Crisis: What's Happening to Science in America

science.org

96 pointsetiam22 comments

> the US has been responsible for a huge amount of the basic research that we've been building the whole scientific enterprise on. We're now engaged in tearing all of that down, and it's a crime against this nation, against its people, and against the rest of the human race - an unforgivable one.

Absolutely Right!

Looking at it from outside the US, nothing makes sense except for two possibilities;

1) A vested group (local+foreign engineered) in the US is bent on destroying everything that made the US a scientific/technological powerhouse. The effects will only be known many years in the future when it will be too late to do anything about it.

2) A complete buy-in into AI/AGI possibilities and hence a belief that you don't need human collaborations across the globe. This is a very iffy premise with a low probability.

Science has many other challenges and if you put everything together, the future does look uncertain. Some links;

Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34248858

MIT president: Why so many optimistic scientists are losing heart - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48304379

New research shows scientific innovation narrows as scientists age - https://datascience.uchicago.edu/insights/new-research-shows...

The administration has attacked, as they promised when running for election, all of the perceived power centers of its opposition: the arts, individuals, educational institutions, selected law firms, science and researchers, civil servants, selected broadcasters, immigrants (legal and illegal), election systems (through both the legal system and political gerrymandering), selected industry projects - especially renewables - and has even made disaster relief partisan. There's nothing unique about the attack on research; it is consistent with the stated intent of the republican majority.

Also from the outside, and as first generation out of Salazar's dictorship, all the signs of an authoritarian administration, yet plenty of people are behaving as it will go away with elections or something.

No, it's not either of those things. The administration doesn't like the politics of most science/academic types, and views intellectualism as a tool of liberals. And as we all know, the libs must be owned.

It's really not any more complicated or thought-through than that.

I agree with some of the other commenters that the author’s tone is a more important discussion topic than his observations.

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