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Comment by bshepard | Hacker News Reader

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There are plenty of links in the article to support specific statements, you can just skip over the parts where he expresses frustration at the damage to an incredible asset the US has built over many years, and the long term consequences this will have for the US and for the world.

It’s a pity he can’t be as measured and scientific in his communication as the current US administration, but we can’t all aspire to that level of technocratic excellence.

It's hard enough to be unemotional when the livelihood of yourself (and others you care about) is on the line, but it's doubly hard when you think justice has been violated.

There's justice violated, and there's dismantling the whole goddamned thing.

What would non partisan look like at this point? The administration is actively targeting American and non American scientists who do not agree with their world view. By any moral metric I’m aware of most of the administration is fairly defined as “vile”(the president publicly brags about committing many sins for example) and in comparison to prior administrations they are largely under qualified(“incompetent”). You might say that’s true of many politicians which might be the case however that then makes it non partisan.

At some point people need to call a spade a spade. I wish we weren’t here but we are and the anger is justified, the names factual.

If you read each line, everything is factually correct. It only seems like name calling because to factually describe the members of this administration you have to use those terms.

It's not partisan -- it's pointing a finger at a political party that has waged war on science. It's a factual assessment.

A partisan take would be "other team bad because my team good"

The Muslim empires stopped supporting science and intellectual curiosity just as the European powers slipped into the renaissance.

War against science never ends well.

Why do you think this is an accurate characterization of how the Islamic Caliphates of the medieval world worked? How much of what we label "science funding" was happening anywhere at all then, why was this more important to the European Renaissance than traditional explanations like "an influx of Byzantine Greeks with ancient texts fleeing the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453"? (And how much of what we characterize as the European Renaissance involved" science" or "institutional science funding" as we understand it today?)

I think you're taking an extremely basic, high-level narrative of history - something like "During what westerners call the middle ages, European powers were backwards and the Islamic powers at the same time were flourishing and did a lot of scientific discovery" - and then immediately using your basic understanding of that narrative to argue for a policy position today, without thinking at all about any deeper historical complexity of what was happening across an entire civilizational sphere centuries before our time when the entire world was different - what would an ancient Islamic caliph have actually understood about the value of basic scientific research funding by the state, for instance.

And this bugs me mostly because it's such an unscientific worldview.

I was saying intellectual curiosity. As in one morning waking up and realising everything your ancestors believed in was a bunch of bullshit. That attitude became heavily discouraged in the Islamic world.

Is it actually consistent with intellectual curiosity to wake up one morning and realize that everything your ancestors believed in was a bunch of bullshit? It seems wildly implausible that every single belief held by your ancestors was wrong, and probably some beliefs were correct and others were incorrect and it's not necessarily trivial to distinguish which ones were which; or even to know from many generations removed which beliefs your ancestors actually held.

What goes on is partisan situation - and the words article used to describe administration are factually correct descriptions of reality. They are not empty insults, but simply truth.

The ideology of "dont tell truth about conservatives, because it makes them look bad" is how they got empowered.

Yeah, this read more like a long twitter rant than anything I'd expect to find on science.org. With posts like these, I always wonder what the intent is? I'm an outsider, so to convince me of anything you'd have to give more context to your claims (linking to a few publications and using their titles as a priori fact isn't convincing). If you want to convince someone who has enough context to understand each claim, wouldn't their opinions already be too entrenched to sway from a post like this?

If you were a true outsider, if you genuinely didn't know what's going on, you would be very alarmed. Why is science.org posting things that sound like Twitter rants? They say the government hates science and wants to destroy it, that's pretty scary! Achieving this alarm is the intent of the post; the author doesn't normally post about politics, but he wants outsiders who don't know about what's going on to understand that this is a really big deal, not just another round of the eternal debate on precise funding priorities.

What's actually happening is that you do know what's going on, but you've adopted a strong identity as an apolitical "outsider". So when you notice that the Trump regime hates scientific research and wants to destroy it, that's deeply uncomfortable; you'd be forced to adopt political opinions if you focused on that and paid attention to it. You're left with no choice but to blame the messenger for pointing towards it.

Hear hear! Well put.

Ostriches with their heads in the sand not wanting to state at the doom. Upset at someone that made them look up, not at the doom itself.

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