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Comment by Schlagbohrer | Hacker News Reader

My friends from grad school who went on to become professors tell me that not only did their grant funding dry up, but they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire, since the students came from foreign countries and faced new visa restrictions. So the money for science is gone, the people to do to the science are gone, and the institutions continue to not support their researchers, workers, and communities. It's the death of research in the usa.

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Best friend had a masters in Biotech and same thing happened in the mid aughts. All of his funding dried up. He was told repeatedly to leave academia, its not worth it. He had a hard time leaving because he really did love the research they were doing. Said it was one of the hardest decisions he had to make.

He was lucky. He was able to make arrangements to go back to school to get his law degree. He then passed the bar and is now doing corporate law at a big firm in the Midwest.

Even now, several years later, he looks back and said he was smart to heed the warnings because its only gotten worse since the time he got out. He also had the ability to pivot into law, which not a lot of people would/could do.

I wonder what discoveries that could've helped people are now pushed back years if not decades.

Given the reproducibility crisis and perverse incentives of the past several decades, it may be less significant than you think. There’s no philosopher stone that turns money into impactful research. Fewer people in it for the love of the game focused on fewer problems may actually be a good thing.

Booooo

Yeah just milk those suckers dry. Hope dare they try to do something good and ask to get paid

What a weird argument, sorry. You're positing that those working in science aren't doing it for your decided "correct" reasons. Does this go for other industries as well? We should fire all bus drivers that aren't in it for the love of the game? Can't one still provide value?

I also think you're wrong in how this would shape incentives and the "reproducibility crisis". It certainly doesn't help that random things get axed and people can't survive in academics.

Americans voted to bring the country back to the 1950's and the plan is working perfectly

The fifties are when a lot of this infrastructure got its start.

They want the 1850s.

1850s was the beginning of the railroad boom. You're thinking 1750s.

Even the 1950s allowed for Operation Paperclip. This time is different.

The institutions and trust that generations of Americans carefully built has been gleefully torched by cruel incompetents in the space of a handful years. The damage, physical and social, is incalculable. The unpunished crimes, endless.

The reconstruction, if it happens at all, will take decades. It was all so unnecessary, so foolish.

The soft power the US has lost will take a generation or more to rebuild if it's ever rebuilt.

The American Empire is gone and not coming back. It rose in a very different world and once these competitive advantages in science and elsewhere have been squandered they won't ever get back to the same level; there's too much competition from other countries now and too little faith that the US won't do this again.

As much as I hate it, we're heading into a more violent and less prosperous world. Whatever that morphs into long term almost certainly won't be as nice for Americans as the recent past was.

Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment.

> Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment.

Uh....that's more the fault of a president who thought a totally normal thing (arms treaties with expiring restrictions) was a "scam" (not to mention, a black man he hates was responsible for said treaty) and ripped up said treaty. We literally were in a treaty, with Iran, that was doing all the things Trump said he wanted.

Then thought he could bully a country he probably thinks of as "a bunch of sand", ignoring the fact that a quarter of the world's oil drives right by them. I've heard foreign policy analysts say that it seemed like Iran never realized how much power they did until Trump pissed them off, they responded, the shipping industry universally said "ohhh hell no" and dropped anchor....and Iranian leadership looked around and said "........wait. We've been able to do that THIS WHOLE TIME?!!!" and then their plan become to outlast Trump's administration.

Iran realizing they can cripple the world economy is a genie that will not be put back in its bottle, even as countries scramble to decarbonize. Oil is still required for lubricants, plastics, and chemical production.

Add in the fact that the US military is being run by a guy who is more concerned about people being clean-shaven than actually running the military as an organization and by all accounts, barely managed ~2 dozen soldiers, then in civilian life failed, repeatedly, at managing businesses. Who has kicked out or pissed off dozens of senior military leaders, as well as pissed off anyone who was remotely debating whether to reenlist.

It's more than just "that one president". It's the whole system that brought him to power, where a large part of the population has been trained to hate and fear for almost half a decade now.

That the US military is run by a clown is a feature, not a bug. That an incompetent buffoon like Trump is at the steering wheel is not an accident.

Trump is doing exactly what the moneyed interests behind him have put him in power for - dismantling the system of checks and balances, of regulations and restrictions that prevent the oligarchs from thoroughly screwing the population.

Good luck trying to restore any of your civil institutions after Trump and his ilk - and I don't expect that to be after 2028.

> Uh....that's more the fault of a president

Who so far has been put into office twice by?

Grifty ignoramuses...?

Voters, but a minority of them.* Then kept in office by a minority (43%) of Republican Senate legislators.

* Yes, that is the correct term. In each election >50% chose "Not Trump".

> Yes, that is the correct term. In each election >50% chose "Not Trump".

Uhhh... Not voting at all doesn't count as "Not Trump". It counts as "I don't care," which implicitly means "whatever everyone else thinks".

This is such a dumb thing to try to play semantic games about. A majority of voters elected the clown, and the population of non-voters is complicit in that.

Your comment is supercilious and confidently-incorrect. The most-charitable interpretation is that you have been misinformed ever since the last election from some preliminary estimate of incomplete counts.

1. Of all ballots, only 49.7961% were for Trump. [0]

2. Of ballots where someone made a non-blank choice for President, 50.1976% were for candidates who were not-Trump.

So when I explicitly wrote about a "minority" of "voters", that really does mean an an actual mathematical minority of the people who actually voted, thankyouverymuchdamnit.

[0] https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024pres...

Wow, you're pretty obnoxious.

Guess you're right, though

> This is such a dumb thing to try to play semantic games about. [...] Wow, you're pretty obnoxious.

As the saying goes: "Don't start nothin', won't be nothin'."

You tried calling them out with a “gotcha” to make yourself look smart and then got told off, but they’re the obnoxious one?

No, I called them out on something I thought they were wrong about because they were being super obnoxious in the way they were stating it.

Turns out they were right, but instead of losing the attitude, they doubled down on the toxicity. When I admitted they were right, they doubled down again.

So yeah, pretty obnoxious, all told.

By your figures, about 50% chose Trump, twice.

Enough to condemn the US forever in the eyes of the world. It’s no longer seen as a reliable ally or a desirable destination by the majority around the world.

Strictly speaking, that Presidential race was not enough, since Trump alone would have been far-more survivable. A mere repeat of 2016-2020 would have been shameful and humiliating, but not the same kind of diplomatic self-implosion.

What is enough involves the outcomes of other elections/candidates, where almost all the Republican party decided that this time around they were going to go into full-steam ahead with Trump's whims and crimes.

He has, as predicted, destroyed the very idea of America, and all those who voted for him and are collaborating with him deserve the consequences, particularly his followers who he reliably uses then betrays. I feel sorry for the people who didn’t vote for him though, the slide into fascism is beginning and many don’t recognise it yet.

Yes, largely the fault of a people's imperfect system that their ancestor's elected representatives largely built and they inherited.

There are only one people that have any chance of changing that system though.

I think this is an offensive and self fulfilling view. Americans are too dumb to do science so we need to rely almost entirely on foreigners from almost entirely the same two countries to do it for us. There's lots of holes in this scheme. I don't really want politicians to control funding for science but then again we've become somewhat of a degree mill and there's a lot of useless careerism in academia.

I will give an example. Did we need years and years of funding for a lab to work on an obscure programming language for multiprocessing that basically only that lab ever used? Probably not. How much of funded science is just useless waste for a group of people to play with things like this? A lot, I would speculate. There isn't really a good way to spot what's useful and what isn't but let's not pretend academia is a purely selfless institution.

The same is roughly true for Silicon Valley investments once the herd mentality sets in. Yet it is celebrated as being the best way for commercial progress.

Almost all advances in deployed PLs come from academic research. Not sure what kind of point you’re trying to make

The majority of your argument has little to do with your initial complaint about China and India. What does poaching less of the world's best and brightest to contribute to our market and universities have to do with ensuring people are working on meaningful projects?

They are about 50% of all foreign grad students. Can you explain why the disproportionate representation? Why aren't more US citizens in grad school for STEM if it is so valuable to us?

The thing about the academic job market is it's paper thin. I argue we produce too many PhDs. People seek out prestigious degrees. Our immigration system rewards more highly educated foreign students, sensibly, but that means there's more incentive to get advanced degrees. There's absolutely not just pure science going on in academia. Grad student wages are depressed and more foreign grad students does not help that.[1] There's a lot of careerism. I would argue some people exploit grad students. I don't think this is even very debatable. So I think put together, we likely print too many PhDs. One could argue that's not true relative to the overall job market but relative to tenure track positions, it is absolutely a fact.

[1]: https://www.nber.org/digest/dec06/impact-foreign-students-ea...

> Why aren't more US citizens in grad school for STEM if it is so valuable to us?

Graduate research in the United States is often an exercise in exploitation of cheap labor.

China and India have a large pool of highly educated workers who can qualify for graduate research. Their visas specifically prohibit them for seeking alternative employment in the United States.

You can demand long hours and very low pay. The payoff to them is a chance at long-term employment in the US for more money than they could earn at home, and in any event increased status and employment opportunities when they return.

The payoff for native-born kids is not at all the same. Even for those who can afford graduate school, opportunity cost may be prohibitive.

The US has decided that creating new scientists out of its own citizens has no economic value.

Ya that's a big part of my point. I think there's very obviously economic exploitation going on which comes from putting degrees on a stick. There's that link to a (2006!) paper about depressed grad student wages.

A story Steven Kotkin recently told in an interview:

"And so the anecdote goes that Xi Jinping bragged that they were going to — China - was going to win the competition because they had 1.3 billion people to choose talent from. They had the biggest talent supply.

And the elder statesman, Lee Kuan Yew, said, 'You're wrong. You have 1.3 billion to draw from, but the United States has 8 billion to draw from, and so they have the upper hand, and don't forget that."

And if you are any kind of strategic thinker when faced with that problem, you will do two things

1. Invest in propaganda to ensure the US becomes hostile to immigrants.

2. Invest in opening yourself up to immigration.

China is openly doing 2. It would be foolish to assume they are are not also investing in 1 and secretly cheering on the current administrations hateful stupidity.

Immigration is the US superpower, and everyone who wants to knock them off the number 1 spot is eroding it.

R&D is hit or miss. And a lot will miss. It's really no different from the VC model where 90% of their startups will fail but the 10% that succeed will make up for the rest.

Pointing out a few examples that didn't go anywhere is a meaningless argument. You need to look at it holistically.

I am not arguing that all R&D must succeed. That's hugely different from someone who deliberately builds obscure nonsense and masks it behind publications and tenure. What you're saying is there is no waste in academia. If anyone questions the merits of some research, they are anti-science. I think people who think academia is a bastion of science would be disappointed with the reality.

Even with perfect information regarding R&D outcomes, capitalism is competitive.

Capitalism is duplication of effort.

I've never been particularly convinced by the crusade to eliminate alternatives to capitalism in the name of eliminating a society's wasteful behavior.

Because I criticized academia does not mean I support political types ripping up funding nor scrapping it altogether. My thought is that academia has had a reckoning coming for some time because their practices are not sustainable. It relies on a huge number of foreign grad students to prop itself up, it's costs have become very expensive for Americans. There's a number of credible arguments to be made. The nicest way I could put it is that the impact of a lot of work that academics do is not that high. But it's prestigious being a professor and there are high incentives to keep publishing for some, gaming citations with mediocre results is perhaps a path to tenure.

At some point this was not going to continue to sustain itself, something would give. Now, I think it's unfortunate that it became political. That means that my criticisms will be viewed through partisan lenses. I am not a fan of political types deciding what to fund. But I also think academia can be full of itself and this shield they can hide behind of "just doing pure science" is baloney. Some are. Definitely not everyone. So I personally think there should be a reduction in the number of PhDs granted and the overall size of academia but that is not in favor of getting rid of it or the way it's being done presently.

American exceptionalism is regressing to the mean.

Strangely enough, america's tech sector is still exceptional on a global stage. I'm not entirely sure why. There's something magic that happens in the bay area as a result of funding and talent density.

Its weird - I'm australian. We have the same caliber of software engineers here. But there's not the same ambition amongst skilled engineers to solve problems at the world stage. And its far more difficult to convince investors to give you the capital to try.

The technology sector is propping up the US economy. The AI race is - so far - making this even more true.

Likely because California is not beholden to other interests. Even rural voices in California are subdued when it comes to big city politics, especially San Francisco.

My half-baked sense is that America is good at making the best things for the highest cost, but tends to be meh at making good or adequate things at a competitive price. Our military seems like the strongest example, but I feel like it also describes healthcare/biotech, education, and maybe housing.

This works well for tech, because a good design can be scaled to serve the whole world, and we can outsource manufacturing to companies like China or Taiwan who are better at cost-effectiveness. (And have lower wages. Maybe that's the entire explanation.)

> The technology sector is propping up the US economy

Probably more accurate to say the healthcare sector is propping up the US economy. The only sector broadly hiring through all the layoffs of recent years.

Tech grabs the headlines and has extremely valuable firms concentrated in a handful of cities. On the other hand, those firms tend not to employ a lot of people. Healthcare is less flashy, but every city has a hospital (or a few) that (each) does a few billion $ in revenue while providing thousands of recession-resistant jobs.

"But before you start snickering at those stupid Americans, know this: every other country in the world has passed a law just like this in the years since."

The reason is copyright law keeping the monopoly going

See https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-01-01...

Quote: ``` Anticircumvention law originates in the USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an “access control” for a copyrighted work.

So practically speaking, if you design a device or service with even the flimsiest of systems to prevent modification of its application code or firmware, it’s a felony — a jailable felony — to modify that code or firmware. It’s also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass that access control, which means that pen-testers who even describe how they access a device or system face criminal liability.

```

@josephg Being from the EU myself, I'm surprised in the same way you are. There is certainly something good going on there as well, at least when looking at certain technologies in isolation, where the US leads.

How come there's still no better desktop processor than Intel/AMD on a per core basis? This is just one example. Nobody's made anything at that level still.

These are companies built in the heyday of American hegemony. The concern is not around dominance of existing science. Rather, the issues are:

- science that simply will not get done, and may be lost to humanity altogether. There is research the US would have done this year that will not get done elsewhere this year. Once the individual researchers leave the field, there is no guarantee the research will get done this decade, or the next, or the next.

- Intel and AMD lean on technology developed in the 1950s. US science and R&D done in 2026 similarly will underwrite US industrial success in the 2050s and beyond. This is like the classical warning against eating your seed corn (instead of saving it to plant). Pressing pause will have an impact, but one would not expect it to show up in the industry league tables for some time.

I see. So some of the damage done today will materialize decades from now. So we have to plan for that.

The world didn't want American leadership.

If we want to prevent this from happening people need to be able to trust their government and feel their interests are shared by their representatives.

We need people to be less racist and stop voting for politicians they hope will hurt the right people.

Less motivation for people to be racist if they have their needs met.

Except their need to be racist. Sorry, it's pretty easy to be any kind of bigot with all your needs met.

Yeah there are plenty of rich racists. But I think the racism party would take a haircut if people didn't feel screwed over.

> Less motivation for people to be racist if they have their needs met.

If and only if what they'll be given is not taken away by anyone under any reason.**

Loss aversion bias innately exists within us for a reason: How can anyone live if someone else seeks to take what they have away?

I think this is true. When needs aren't met, they are more likely to follow a cult leader.

Their needs are met.

They are turning to racism because of their wants and fears.

I honestly think the decline started sometime in the 80s when it was accepted that everything is solely about profits and nothing else. It took a while but the enshittification of the country is accelerating. The latest developments are in my view just a symptom of this much longer trend.

Bingo. Michael Wolff illustrates nicely how Trump is the literal embodiment of the "greed is good" 80's culture.

Of course we also have Ronald Reagan to thank. And that administration spawned the career of John Roberts, which we can now see as a through line to the destruction of The Court.

It's a bit reductive to pin this on Ronald Reagan.

The entire western world had been shifting towards neoliberalism as a direct response to the eastern world shifting towards communism since WW2.

Trump also isn't the embodiment of anything other than the guy who didn't take it seriously and suddenly ended up with the job because the voters in the country decided it couldn't be any worse under him than whatever the current situation they were living with was.

Or you could go all the way back to Reconstruction. The same way that an embittered Germany led to WWII, we are living with an embittered, mutant form of Confederate culture taking its revenge on the Union that put it down 160 years ago. The current culture war intermingles Southern Christian Conservative and Neoliberal interests. They're angry that the world has rapidly grown more progressive, as much as they're angry they lost their war. It might only take 5-10 years and eventually swing back, but it could also get worse, if their leaders become more extreme (strongman leaders often do get worse, as do religious extremists).

That's exactly how Professor Sean Wilentz put it on one of his podcast episodes. He referred to it as "the politics of the aggrieved" I believe, while tracing the literary and legal influences from then until now.

Trump is the embodiment of a culture that was willing to make that vote. Of the populace that was tricked by The Apprentice and The Art of the Deal. Of the media more concerned with engagement than information. He spent his lifetime curating the image that made him uniquely positioned for his role, even if he didn't expect to get it.

I for one welcome -the ̶̶̶̶̶screw ̶̶̶̶worm- our new AI overlords.

"A handful of years"? This is like the trend in K–12 education of blaming all issues on the COVID-19 pandemic. No, education was in a visible decline for five years before COVID, which means it had probably been declining for another decade or two before that.

They don’t want the 1950s. We were pretty science forward then. The problem is they don’t really want to live in a world driven by facts because it eats into their privilege and they would rather have that.

Back to the 1930s.

People in the 1950s were convinced that the nuclear family was a disaster and the leading cause of divorce/poverty.

Huh? That seems counter to my perceptions. Any links to expound upon that?

Nicole Rudolph just did a video on this topic. I haven't watched it yet though.

Probably because the nuclear family doesn’t include grandparents helping.

In the 1950s the US had lots of foreign scientists.

In fact if the US hadn't had its huge influx of foreign scientists fleeing the Nazis, who knows where we'd even be today.

Then there would be someone else who'd come. Considering they came to US and not to other places out of Europe. It would mean conditions were favorable in US.

I'm not sure what you're trying to imply, as I can't parse what you mean by "there would be someone else who'd come." Getting the world's 100 greatest plumbers won't fundamentally change the course of the course of the US economy for the better, getting the world's 100 greatest physicists to come to the US certainly puts the US on a path towards world economic domination.

Point is, the 1950s had highly international science, and the US welcomed international scientists and benefited hugely from them.

The US in 2025 and 2026 is extremely hostile to international scientists and is hurting greatly from it.

My point is simple. Real world is highly complex and dynamic system. It is not a linear relationship e.g European scientists never came --> US remained backward.

US may have evolved differently, Asian scientists may have come, US progress may have started a few decades late, US may not have been super power but normal power (not such a bad thing) and so on.

> The US in 2025 and 2026 is extremely hostile to international scientists and is hurting greatly from it.

I never get this point how come these extremely smart scientist feel okay to come to US as long funding is there meanwhile US can continue thousand other extremely bad things all over the world.

These scientists seems like FAANG employees who don't look at what their employers are up to as long paychecks are huge. However once leaving or fired from job they become moral philosophers of our times.

You're not wrong, but let's not forget that some large number of scientists (cough Werner von Braun cough) were fleeing prosecution as Nazis.

The US in 1950s was very big on science. Nuclear, space, biology, etc, etc. Science seemed to have an answer to everything. I frankly don't remember a time when science was in such a low regard among the US public; maybe in the Deep South in 18th century.

The retrogression perception is correct; but the specific timeframe is so incorrect that the back of my head blew out like a pinata.

The goal is - and I am not picking on the reactionary wing alone, this impulse has broad support across our ideologies - de-industrialization. The complexity of post-Enlightenment civilization is being rejected, in favor of some hypothetical state. This puts the past timeframe as far back as the 17th century.

But not a "real" past. No one can recreate the past. Only their idea of the past.

And of course, when you "create" anything, too much and too quickly, you risk systemic collapse. Not a problem if you imagine you will be Immortan Joeing around in your Death Wagon, but odds are, I'm sorry to say, against it.

Trump is a populist doing populist things, including attacking the intellectuals.

Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years, which frankly was a pretty dumb "victory" to celebrate, because now they voted in a dumb gorilla that is just smashing things as revenge.

> Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years,

Any citations on this?

Sure

https://www.aei.org/articles/partisan-professors/

I'd be shocked to find anyone surprised by this.

That doesn't show they were purged. There are many reasons their numbers declined.

> That doesn't show they were purged. There are many reasons their numbers declined.

Fun fact, what you're arguing is actually one of the reasons Charlie was murdered.

He notoriously said that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake. He specifically referred to Title VII which states even a neutral policy can be racism if it produces disparate impact[1] in practice. That is, if a neutral policy results in fewer black people being hired, that's evidence of racism. Charlie disagreed with that.

It's fun to see leftists argue the same when it comes to discrimination against right wing or centrist academics.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact

Well, a key difference is that race is an intrinsic immutable attribute, and political views aren't.

The paradox of tolerance is real. And more practically, it's impossible to guarantee representation of all viewpoints because there are an infinite number of them.

> that race is an intrinsic immutable attribute

Not to those familiar with the history of the US Census racial classifications, given the number of times the categories shifted and changed it seems more than a little opinionated.

Ok fine, let's call it "ethnicity" then. Would you and your sibling care to comment on the actual point of the parent comment thread?

> fine, let's call it "ethnicity" then.

Ethnicity is mostly stable for most individuals, sure, but it too is hardly immutable - people do and have changed their countries, social cultures, and daily language usage- even to the point of struggling to think and talk in their primary birth languages.

> care to comment on the actual point of the parent comment thread?

Ahh, that "Charlie" (Kirk) had opinions, that US science is in chaos, that US use of the phrase "leftists" is always grating, that a two party Hotelling's law cluster feck inevitably resulting from US style elections is inadequate to politically represent a large population?

There's a lot going on here; one thing at a time is that race being an "an intrinsic immutable attribute" is all manner of horseshit.

What's horseshit is derailing a discussion about political bias in academia by quibbling over use of the word "race" when it wasn't even essential to the point.

People can't change between white and black skin. "Racism" exists in the US. Your gaslighting is embarrassing.

> race is an intrinsic immutable attribute

Is it?

Care you define who makes up the "white race"? Or any other overly-broad category that typically gets bandied about as "race"?

From my perspective, as someone who is flexibly categorized as "white" or "latino", depending on whatever is most convenient for the categorizer, "race" is a remarkable fluid label. Most people can't even agree on what "race" folks of mixed ethnic heritage actually are.

Race is a social construct. There's nothing intrinsic or immutable about any social construct.

I think you know perfectly well my meaning in context of the comment thread I was replying to.

Yes, some people are mixed ethnicity or "white passing". Yes societal views changes ("Italian used to not be considered white"). At the end of the day, most people fall into one of the categories and don't get to change that.

Which categories are these though? William Z. Ripley's 1899 The Races of Europe or more, say, Steven Coons Carleton's 1939 treatise?

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

But since you're insisting that this be spelled out: The categories are quite arbitrary, can vary, and can change. Yes, race is a social construct.

The point is the physical attributes that often define the categories cannot be significantly changed. One can't particularly make their own skin lighter, regardless of people with marginal skin tones being able to change other aspects about themselves to pass for a lighter category, or regardless of being able to go to a different community where one might be in the lighter category by default.

Compare with say how easy it is for someone with different political views to just hold their tongue when bureaucrats and true believers are waxing poetic about DEI, just as one had to hold their tongue when bureaucrats and true believers were waxing poetic about the virtues of mega golf or owning a boat, just as one might have to hold their tongue these days when bureaucrats and true believers are waxing poetic about the virtues of fascism.

(also can we stop using the word "conservative" as a lazy synonym? Applying that label to the Republican party after ~2020 is absurd)

> The categories are quite arbitrary, can vary, and can change. Yes, race is a social construct.

Obviously.

> Compare with say how easy it is for someone with different political views to just hold their tongue when bureaucrats and true believers are waxing poetic about DEI, just as one had to hold their tongue when bureaucrats and true believers were waxing poetic about the virtues of mega golf or owning a boat, just as one might have to hold their tongue these days when bureaucrats and true believers are waxing poetic about the virtues of fascism.

That seems very un-Australian; I'm unfamiliar with the concept of letting rank stupidity ride w/out having a poke at it, and a lot of people have boats, big, small, whatever.

I'm quite fond of shed built ground effect boat/planes FWiW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ILbQHnHPnY

> can we stop using the word "conservative" as a lazy synonym? Applying that label to the Republican party after ~2020 is absurd

TBH I'm not sure I have ever done that; "Conservative" varies by country, as does "Liberal".

Well I'm glad that you've apparently got a lower density of rank stupidity in Australia such that you've never been in situations where you've just had to let it wash over you while avoiding provoking it! In the US we've got an epidemic of it, quite obviously.

That's a cool boat/plane! I'm certainly not picking on people who are interested enough to build their own, or even just buy into doing something they themselves really enjoy. Rather I was referring to the previous managerial fashions in the US, before the DEI fashion took over.

The point about "conservative" wasn't directed at you, but all of the parent comments who did use it that way

Australia was once awash with "real British" people who constantly attempted to lord it over all - it really doesn't pay to let self denoted elites get away with that shit.

Modern Australia is seeing new waves of various behaviours, like all cultures these things ebb and flow - at our last elections the poor (particular) Christian conservative liberals that tried to ride the US wave of being mean to trans people and blaming big problems on a tiny tiny minority got hammered electorally for what was seen as un-Australian behaviour (giving everyone a fair go, regardless).

This time around the xenophobes are back stronger than ever riding a wave of flag draping nationalism not so subtlely hiding a grab bag of white supremacism and general X-phobia; we have

> I think you know perfectly well my meaning in context of the comment thread I was replying to.

No, I don't, and smugly insinuating I have some ulterior motive or whatever is, frankly, offensive.

I asked you a question because I didn't know what you meant, because you made a statement that was wildly ambiguous even with well-defined context.

> most people fall into one of the categories

One of... Which categories, exactly? This is why I'm asking. You keep making statements as if they're somehow inherently obvious, but... I can think of many different competing definitions of "race", so I'm trying to figure out which one you're using, or if you're even using one at all.

White vs black skin, a very obvious category in a conversation about DEI programs or systemic bias in the US.

u/xdennis You think it's a fun fact that Charlie Kirk died? Crazy.

> It's fun to see leftists argue the same when it comes to discrimination against right wing or centrist academics.

I didn't argue anything.

I made a point to say that the link did NOT show a purge happened. It's funny because you are supporting my comment by literally providing another link as if to admit that the original one didn't support the claim.

But hey, pretend I said stuff. You're the one who thinks CK's death was fun.

What if its just self selection?

Conservatives spread propaganda about woke universities -> conservative kids are less likely to go. Do this for decades and you end up in the situation we're in.

Either that or conservatives are just stupider and less likely to be academics; which is, in my opinion, more likely than your hypothesis about grand conspiracy.

And it's more than the self selection force of conseratives being too frightened that college will change their worldview. Take a liberal and a conservative with equivalent postgraduate degrees. Now offer them their choice of a faculty position or a C-suite career track. Based on the values that define their respective ideologies, is it a coin toss for which path either chooses?

Or even that the categories are shifting. People who hold perfectly reasonable classical Conservative viewpoints are now excluded from the Republican party. An institution failing to shift more right doesn't make it biased.

What if it's not that?

Let me give you a hint: the concept of DEI statement to apply for a position exists

I don't think there is surprise that higher learning is associated with progressivism. I think the surprise is that someone believes its indicative of a giant conspiracy to exile conservative professors.

> I don't think there is surprise that higher learning is associated with progressivism.

This is such a wildly elitist take. There's nothing intrinsically progressive about education, and to just declare so as fact is an excellent example of the exact kind of hostility that keeps non-progressives from being at home in higher education.

> I think the surprise is that someone believes its indicative of a giant conspiracy to exile conservative professors.

Is it really surprising that people who disagree with someone's politics would let that bleed over into their assessment of that person's professional abilities?

We literally see this everywhere! People use a person's politics to discredit other aspects of their being all the time.

Conservative professors are a rare breed in academia because non-conservatives in academia make it a very hostile workplace environment.

> just declare so as fact is an excellent example of the exact kind of hostility that keeps non-progressives from being at home in higher education.

My friend, I simply stated a conclusion that is very commonly accepted, including by conservatives (hints: populism, religion, gender roles). You're welcome to dispute it but instead you declare it 'hostile'. If conservatives think this is offensive then I'll add that to the list of reasons they seem to avoid scenarios where their viewpoints are challenged (because that's how academia works).

> Is it really surprising that people who disagree with someone's politics would let that bleed over into their assessment of that person's professional abilities?

It certainly can. That's a long way from a coordinated conspiracy. And there are layers of insulation like wanting talent regardless of personality and avoiding legal issues.

> Conservative professors are a rare breed in academia because non-conservatives in academia make it a very hostile workplace environment.

Like stealing their lunch or lighting them up in a reply-all or what are we talking about here? Note I'm not freaking out that you "just declared something as a fact".

> My friend, I simply stated a conclusion that is very commonly accepted, including by conservatives (hints: populism, religion, gender roles).

People commonly accept that God exists, too, all across the political spectrum. That doesn't mean he actually does exist, though. "Commonly accepted" does not mean "is true".

> It certainly can. That's a long way from a coordinated conspiracy. And there are layers of insulation like wanting talent regardless of personality and avoiding legal issues.

No one in this thread is claiming a "coordinated conspiracy", just years and years of ever increasing political bias amongst faculty at universities in the U.S.

C'mon, implicit bias training is supposed to teach you about how the negative impacts of persistent, low-grade bias accumulate over time, right?

> Like stealing their lunch or lighting them up in a reply-all or what are we talking about here? Note I'm not freaking out that you "just declared something as a fact".

Like not inviting them to conferences, social gatherings, networking opportunities, etc.

Again, decades of small bias add up. I mean, isn't that the entire thesis of things like "systemic racism"? Why would that not also be true in other areas?

Don't get me wrong, I believe theories like systemic racism have merit and are largely true. I just acknowledge that, if it's true that being black in America is an inherent disadvantage due to years of accumulated bias, it's probably also true that being conservative in academia is also an inherent disadvantage, due to the same mechanism.

All that being said, way to double down on the elitism!

> "Commonly accepted" does not mean "is true".

Correct. And if you asserted the existence of a god based on this common notion I wouldn't scream that it's religous hostility.

Of course, dieties are not a great example here since they're based purely on people's superstitions.

> No one in this thread is claiming a "coordinated conspiracy"

From above: "Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years"

Most political purges I'm familiar with aren't "oops, implicit bias!"

At the start of this I said: "I think the surprise is that someone believes its indicative of a giant conspiracy to exile conservative professors." If you agree with this could have saved yourself a lot of trouble.

> Like not inviting them to conferences, social gatherings, networking opportunities, etc.

We're talking about adults, right? In any event, it would be interesting to see some stats or hear some anecdotes on the matter.

> Again, decades of small bias add up.

Does it? Seems far more likely to settle on some sort of median. It's just that the median is considered 'leftist' because it embraces the scientific method while most conservative platforms need to deny evolution, climate change, etc.

> it's probably also true that being conservative in academia is also an inherent disadvantage, due to the same mechanism.

There are far, far more dissimilarities.

> At the start of this I said: "I think the surprise is that someone believes its indicative of a giant conspiracy to exile conservative professors." If you agree with this could have saved yourself a lot of trouble.

You were clearly implying that the person you were responding to was saying it was some kind of conspiracy. I'm not buying this sudden retcon.

> We're talking about adults, right? In any event, it would be interesting to see some stats or hear some anecdotes on the matter.

Thats... literally what you were replying to in the aforementioned post! Here's the link again, in case you forgot: https://www.aei.org/articles/partisan-professors/ It's literally a lack of diversity, just like there used to be an equally stark lack of diversity in tech, etc.

I'm almost positive you're just trolling at this point.

> I'm not buying this sudden retcon.

I mean it's right there in black and white. Yes, we've gone on a few tangents since then.

> literally what you were replying to in the aforementioned post!

No it's the AEI complaining that there aren't enough conservatives in higher education. There aren't any stats on summer barbecues MAGA adjunct professors weren't invited to. There aren't any anecdotes about an infowarrior instructor missing out on networking events. Just look at the quoted words above my request to see what they are in reference to.

> From above: "Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years"

Yet, when you are handed evidence that this is objectively true, you move the goalposts.

You're clearly not arguing in good faith. As such, I'm done with this conversation

This is such a wildly elitist take

There is a reason why a lot of progressive ideas worldwide originated in and spread from universities, often time resulting in student revolts/rebellions. Throughout history, starting in 1202, academia was always a source for new ideas, usually non establishment: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Student_activism&...

FTA

> The lack of diversity among professors is problematic for both education and research, ostensibly the overriding purposes of universities.

I basically did a spit-take here. Lack of diversity is suddenly--and only--a problem when it doesn't include conservatives.

The funny thing is that racial and cultural diversity is higher amongst faculty than the general population. For decades America has attracted the brightest and highest-achieving college students and researchers from around the world, and those people eventually get faculty positions and advance their careers. It has gotten to the point that we hear people (usually conservatives) complain that some fields are dominated by non-white people.

And shock, as it turns out, American conservative viewpoints are actually a minority in the world. If higher education were actually representative of world population, 1/5 would be Chinese, 1/5 would be Indian, 1/5 European, and only 1/20 would even be American. If we were generous and say that half of America is conservative (it's not), then only 1/40 would be an American conservative. Most people in the world are not American conservatives. This is just a fact. They say that reality has a liberal bias. For the record, I don't believe it has a liberal bias, because American liberalism is just a weird grab bag of outposts on the cultural war front, but reality absolutely does not support a rightwing view.

We hear conservatives whine and moan about diversity exactly when it suits them, and we've all seen just exactly how they feel about diversity.

More likely that conservatives turned liberal once the right went all in on anti-intellectualism.

Of course the real question is: what does conservative even mean any more? The joining of Falwell and Reagan fucked both conservatism and evangelical Christianity.

Yep, it's at least partly this. I watched a lot of "moderate" academics become "liberal" after Trump's first election.

If you're a scientist by principles and a moderate by political views, and the right-wing party comes out in opposition to science, well, it's fair that you might then join the "pro-science party". Being pro-science becomes a liberal position.

So it's not that conservatives were "purged" from the ranks of academia.

It’s a pretty commonly repeated theory amongst far right / reactionary “thought leaders”. They call it the “Long March Through the Institutions”. I think the comment you were responding to was ironically referencing it.

It's not especially a "right wing theory" anymore than climate change is a "left wing theory"

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/conservati...

You misunderstand, the idea of the “Long March Through the Institutions” is that innocent conservative intellectuals are the victims of a central, coordinated campaign for them to be expelled from academia in order to transform academia into an institution that serves leftwing agendas. It’s an explicit rejection that such a transformation could occur naturally, and can fairly be considered a conspiracy theory by the mainstream specifically because it meets Barkun’s criteria for conspiracy theories:

  - nothing happens by accident
  - nothing is as it seems
  - everything is connected

as well as the lack of a smoking gun.

I don't really buy that idea, but like the one black guy at the Country Line Dance, you get the strong vibe you are not in the right place, and kind of just want to leave, regardless of how people are upfront treating you.

Yeah you may not believe it personally but there are definitely many in the reactionary right who do. It’s not difficult to find their forums.

The people you’re talking to don’t understand why you would ever want to have the Wrong Kind of Person around an institution as sacred as the university

The phrase wasn't concocted by the right wing, it's was coined by a left-winger as an explicit plan of approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...

Yes, often one wing of political thought leaders will adopt terms and ideas from the other wing to serve as a foundation for their theories. I never suggested that the term itself was invented by someone on the right, merely that it’s a term widely used to describe the very specific idea of a calculated political effort to expel conservatives from academia. Ironically, Rudi’s ambitions were much more grand than simply transforming academia, he wanted to transform society.

Anyway, what you presented is not a “gotcha”, despite the fact that I’ve heard it a million times when engaging with right wing “intellectuals”. It’s still a conspiracy theory.

> To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by 'boring from within', rather by 'doing the job', learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one's own consciousness in working with others.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a German student activist's definitionally anodyne proposal to engage with society and barely referenced in the decades since has probably been coopted more than a little to concoct a new boogeyman for the right wing.

Conservative views are very anti science, look at their consensus on climate change. Of course the universities were going to be mostly liberal.

Like at their core conservatives are against change, that’s the “conserve” part of their name and science is a process that constantly updates our understanding of reality.

Liberal views are very anti-science on race. Some famous professors even lost their positions just for adopting the statistically correct position that the majority of the difference in outcomes between races is accounted for by IQ, which is mostly immutable after childhood, not some societal conspiracy against certain races.

Which famous professors would those be? This is an active research area, with papers published year-round.

James Watson the guy who discovered DNA was stripped of honorary titles based on comments related to race and IQ. there was a lot of discussion about that recently when he died.

Before I reply, let me ask: is that your best example?

Does he not meet the criteria of a famous professor?

Maybe you could start with an actual practicing scientist. One problem you're going to run into here is that, as I said, this is an active area of study. If these papers are firing offenses, someone ought to be telling HR.

Person 1: give me an example of someone who was kicked out of academia for uncomfortable truths.

Person 2: [gives examples]

Person 1: oh ho! But those people are not in academia any more! They're not "practicing scientists"!

Person 2: ...

Yes, me and my Calvinball rule of "actual scientist prevented from publishing on this subject".

There's a kind of Schneierism thing that happens in these threads; like: I could ask, ok, name a scientist practicing in this field. They exist, but they don't have names your 3rd grade science teacher knows.

...I don't think Watson was kicked out for "uncomfortable truths", but because his conclusions kept overstepping the evidence he presented, and in particularly sexist or racist ways.

Again, to be explicit: he did not establish that his claims were true.

That is why it's quite worthwhile to ask if Watson is the best example available. The guy was pretty openly and casually sexist, and his racism wasn't much better.

Even stipulating the imprecise language here, he couldn't "establish that his claims were true", because he did not work in these fields. This is a pop science argument where any "scientist" can just "do science" to answer deep or controversial questions, but obviously that't not how science actually works. His racist comments pertained to several highly specialized fields of study, none of which he worked in. You might as well have asked Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

"just for adopting . ."

OK, I'm really sorry, but "just for adopting" is doing some heavy lifting here.

Watson's other greatest hits: worries about Big Black Dicks; melanin injections as boner pill; what I call "The Cunning Chinaman"; and a whole bucket of others.

Taken in sum: it turns out you can be asked to leave a private club if you are being an asshole.

To clear the air, as a card carrying liberal (even a !gasp! Socialist) I don't necessarily reject empirical racial differences based on genetics. Maybe even for "intelligence", for whatever good that does ya, since "intelligence" lacks anything like a quantitative definition.

But I also think that - if they're even present, which is by no means certain - these are not significant differences. Structuring your entire society around quantitative racial differences, from a strictly utilitarian standpoint, is not enough juice for the squeeze.

But, well, the juice isn't the point, is it?

It's the squeezing - the ability to brutalize your citizenry, to purge Unmanly Virtues like "empathy" or "introspection", to be always prepared for violence - the squeezing, being able to squeeze, is what is important. And the fastest way to do that is convince a bunch of people that other people aren't people. Europe tried that, a few years ago. You might remember that it did not go well. A lesson America never really got. Maybe someday we'll need to learn the same damn thing the same way, except instead of B-17s and Red Army Sex Crime we get to enjoy thermonuclear weapons. Come back Ivan. All is forgiven.

I mean I like to hold my cards closer to my vest than this, but if we're just going right at it:

(1) He wasn't a practicing scientist.

(2) He wasn't fired for making scientific claims, but rather for saying things like "I'm pessimistic about Africa".

(3) He didn't do any research in behavioral genetics, psychometrics, or molecular genetics; his authority in the discussion was "famous science guy".

(4) He lost an honorary and, later, an emeritus position, in which his role was not "scientist" but rather "spokesperson for a scientific organization". I wouldn't want him for a spokesperson either, any more than I'd want Ibram X. Kendi or, maybe closer to the mark, Elijah Mohammed as my spokesperson.

James Watson was closer to Donald Sterling than to Galileo.

Not a Nobel prize winner (his advisor was though), but Stephen Hsu was a fairly high profile case. I remember watching a 2008 Google lecture of his on YouTube in 2019 and wondering- wow, the kind of research people could present a decade ago. Lo and behold...

This is closer, but again:

(1) Lost an administrative position, retained his tenured academic position.

(2) Did not practice in the space. As I understand it, he got jumped for appearing on Stefan Molyneaux's show (Molyneaux is a proud, open white nationalist, though that was not as obvious at the time) and saying he was agnostic about group differences.

The key thing here is, again: Hsu doesn't publish in this field. He himself loudly pointed this out! He's a physicist, not a geneticist or a psychometrician/quant psych.

From what I can tell, the mob attack on Hsu was not well founded. It's not my claim that there haven't been brigaded attacks on academics; there obviously have been. Rather: it's that the scientists who actually practice in this field and actually publish results continue to do so, largely without drama. "Group differences" in "intelligence" (or proxies like EA) are not verboten in academia.

There's an example of a scientist who published on group differences and lost his job, but that example won't do the work this thread hopes it'll do; he was fired for good reason.

"Liberal views" are not anti-science on race. "Liberal views" tend to reject the reductionism and selectivity of "race science" that points to arbitrarily defined measurements like IQ as being the sole explanation for things we can easily prove have multiple better, non-arbitrary explanations.

Bluntly, racists have decided IQ measurements mean they're not racist instead of wondering whether IQ, as a measurement, is itself racist.

Race science is just about the apex of pseudoscience. Academics haven't rejected it because it doesn't mesh with their liberal politics, they've rejected it because it's junk.

Are we just ignoring all the major societal factors that happen to children before and during childhood?

Yeah, I recall that average Irish citizens and Irish immigrants were measured to have pretty bad IQs around a century ago. This changed with improvements to nutrition, health, less alcoholism, and education.

So the research shows that IQ is not purely innate. And this is, at this point, rather old research.

Watson's comments are not based in scientific fact. First of - there is no such thing as a "race". Putting people in classes based on the colour of their skin is ludicrously simplistic, ignoring the incredible genetic diversity in the human genome. There's simply no viable scientific concept that is able to capture the features that "race" is supposed to capture.

Secondly there's no strong argument that links larger population groups genetic makeup to intelligence - that's what Watson claimed and what's so infuriating; it's plain racism. There's an inherited component in intelligence - that much is right. But population groups have enough diversity that this does not have a statistically relevant impact on these groups as a whole.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/13/james-watson-s...

For real. We are doing race science on HN?

Turns out racists love tech news too.

Simple people are drawn to simple models of the world. IQ is an extremely simple model.

Conservatives views are not anti-science, so much as they are a demand that science only be allowed to answer certain questions, and only answer those questions in specific ways.

That is anti science. It’s just faith based dogmatism. You also see it with conservatives calling belief in the scientific process being able to produce knowledge being called scientism like it’s just faith based.

They literally look down on the idea of updating your previous beliefs.

I think conservatives don't really know what they are, and that's a big problem. I think Sagan discussed this. Like science is a pretty well established "institution" dating back centuries. Intellectualism dates back kind of as far back as humanity, almost every large civilization I can think (that left records) of had strong intellectual presence (including Greeks, Romans, etc.).

I'm not even critiquing any particular cultural stance. But I think it's possible and important to critique anti-intellectualism and specially denialisms specially in things that are actually important and threatening to society -- simply because of greed, most of the time. Let's not fool ourselves, climate change denialism isn't like a random cultural thing they chose to deny, it's specifically because of connections to coal, oil and gas industries.

If things are bad, you should want to know what will be the consequences and what can be done to mitigate things. In fact, I think denial tends to create some reactionary behavior from the left as well, sometimes leading to overblown claims around climate change. All of this leads to increasing polarization.

Slowing down cultural change is perfectly fine (as long as it's respectful of well established things like human rights), cosplaying a farmer is fine, whatever. Or being an actual farmer, or living outside of a big city, etc.. What's not fine is actively denying important scientific facts, being hypocritical (and, largely, stupid) in their positions: for example, farming tends to use very high tech equipment and methods, seeds, and so on; I'm sure most farmers enjoy most technological development, treatment against cancers, all sorts of diseases; computers, the internet, etc.. You can't at the same time want progress in cancer treatment and other conditions and want to cut funding to health sciences. And so on. I am willing to even entertain say technological regression. I don't love every technological change we've been through. But at least be consistent, you can't advocate to stop wearing clothes and want to live in the arctic.

Also, culture should be, carefully yes, questioned. It's not because it's cultural that it should stay frozen forever. People who want their culture completely frozen forever are dangerous to human progress and flourishing (I imagine most people wouldn't find ancient practices of human sacrifice, or say medieval torture practices nice and acceptable today). Being careful and well-reasoned is a completely different thing, and something conservatism could stand for instead.

Funny how Conservatives are always so big on the free market, except when no one wants to buy their ideas.

Sure, but isn't the response worse than the problem? When intellectual standards are abandoned (as opposed to correcting a specific bias), discourse degrades into mindless anger, conspiracies and leaders who defraud their own supporters.

Given the money available to conservatives, why haven't they been able to setup vibrant universities, films, art etc. The point here is not to blame conservatives, but push the analysis of the cause to something deeper than just saying that the opponents have all the power.

The piñata bit is a bit hyperbolic, but largely I agree that it’s a movement built against the principles of the enlightenment, and the movements of modernism and post-modernism that grew out of it.

It’s like: what if we took all of the principles of the enlightenment, and forced them through a sieve that served our racist, xenophobic, chauvinist world view? Rediscovering eugenics and pseudoscience, especially for christofascist ambitions and exploitative grifting.

The institutions that built US science dominance were built in the 1950s. A fraction of Americans voted to bring America back to a cartoonish pastiche of images of the olden times (from 1950s, 1920s and 1800s) that they didn't know never existed and they didn't know that partly 'cause of education cuts starting in the 1970s-1980s.

What education cuts? Education spending per pupil has skyrocketed since the 1970s.

"And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now."

You could rewrite this the other way for the prior administration, simply replace the word "include" with preclude.

Not really even that. The 1950s had a lot of problems in terms of racism and sexism, but wealth inequality was much lower than today with extremely high tax rates for the wealthy (under Eisenhower, a Republican!) And most relevant to this discussion, science and scientists were respected and well funded.

I don't think this era of ignorance and anti-intellectualism can be compared to a previous point of time in modern America.

In the 50s taxation on wealthy individuals reached almost 90%.

And somehow they still managed to be very rich!

We funded research in the 1950s . This is more like the 30s.

Americans, broadly, didn't vote—those who did are obviously brainwashed cultists.

Things were considerably better in the '50s than whatever this is that we're living through. Especially for scientists. A lot less inequality too.

The only way in which we're "getting back to the 50s" is that it's now ok again to be openly racist and blatantly suppress the voting rights of black Americans.

I think it's the 20's all over again. We've even got Robber Barons.

If you knew how the academia sauce was made you'd agree with their drastic actions.

Could it have been done better? Yes. But there is literally no way an attempt at that wouldn't have gone exactly like it is now.

The closer you are to ivy leauge research the worse it looks a huge numbers of researchers have completely lost the plot. I can't imagine how bad that gets the further you get away from ivy leauge.

> they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire

Most of the "research" done by graduate students and even tenured faculty as a whole is laughable at best. For every lab that produces groundbreaking output, there are countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda.

Then it should have been easy to cut only those grants instead of the "real science", right?

I'm curious why you think this would be an easy task. It strikes me as quite difficult! Separating scientific wheat from chaff requires a lot of effort and expertise.

As one famous example, Sokal intentionally made up funny bullshit and still fooled a ton of people!

I don't think it's an easy task in reality, but they were claiming there's "countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda" outnumbering the important grants and taking up all the funding, which should be a lot easier to audit for and cut a large portion of it without killing any "real science". Instead, we got a clumsy keyword search.

I'm sure I'll get heat for this, but I think a low-resolution first pass a la keyword search was actually an excellent call from a macro standpoint. It (1) clears out a good chunk of cruft, instantly, with little effort and (2) scares people away from doing further explicitly ideological work.

There are a surprising number of social scientists who engage in both good basic research and useless ideological bone-picking, and the low resolution pass effectively pushes them to focus on their real work.

Ah yes, nothing incentivises focus on "real work" like having to check that your abstract doesn't contain any words that trigger the administrations' censors after some ignorant edgelord's algorithm defunded your study of transgenic mice or black holes.

Luckily now the administration has great scientists like RFK Jr setting research priorities, no more useless ideological bone-picking is taking place

It's actually kind of a hard problem.

There are tens of thousands of grants. Some of them are classified as "medicine" and study things like hormones, some are classified as "computer science" or "mathematics" and study things like statistical bias. Which of these are the "real science" ones (e.g. HRT in older people with menopause or low-T) and which are the partisan-coded ones (e.g. gender HRT)?

Put aside whether or not you think the latter should be funded and suppose you're just trying to distinguish them to make sure the former continues to be. If you can't do it accurately then the current administration will do it anyway but with a machete instead of a scalpel. You'd need a large team of people who can tell the difference to go through them all and classify them. This is nominally the job of the thing referred to as the "deep state", but what do you do if you don't expect them to be non-partisan?

This is why strategies like "have partisans capture the administrators for our side" are a mistake.

Just do as DOGE/Musk: ctrl+f for "diversity" and deny all grants. Even if it had nothing to do with "woke", for instance diversity in bacteria cultures or whatever...

That's the machete. Now present a way to do it properly.

Research on weather and climate is now considered "woke". Anything can be labeled as partisan. Safer to stop funding all research, unless it can be shown to support what we already believe.

and esp. since DOGE was led by Musk, who has an appreciation of basic science. One'd think he'd exercise good judgement and caution when it comes to cutting funding for science research.

What a depressing view of the world.

As a side-gig I taught within the doctoral education program for several high-ranking universities in Europe for about a decade (over a thousand PhD candidates). My impression is that nearly all funding for PhD projects flows to fields like medicine, physics, chemistry, computer science, electronics, and so on. Spending on humanities is absolutely minuscule compared to those.

I don't know, I did grad school in psychology and our grants would have been classified as "Medicine" or "Health" but a huge % of it is fundamentally ideological work rather than basic research. Academia really is a complicated mess, it's not an easy problem.

"R&D is a cost center" what an insightful take.

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