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Comment by NoImmatureAdHom | Hacker News Reader

Am scientist. We needed change. This seems like a stupid way to get change, but it's better than nothing.

Academia was not doing well pre-Trump. The DEI infection ran deep - and it still does. Complete nonsense was getting funded in the social sciences and cognitive science / psychology. It was really tragic. And now all these institutions are saddled with personnel debt. The morons they hired during the DEI moral panic - some of them are even tenured by now. People who overtly aren't even doing science - they are performing their politics with science. Overtly.

This is a blunt instrument, yes. But things were going very poorly overall, and we needed a shake-up.

Given the choice between: Biden (or later Harris) is elected and things keep going the way they were going, or the current timeline, I choose the current timeline.

(P.S.: Scientific American is trash now, you shouldn't read it. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6202 )

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> This is a blunt instrument, yes. But things were going very poorly overall, and we needed a shake-up.

You do understand that what's happening isn't merely a "shake up", right? It's the coordinated dismantling of structural components of America's innovation economy in ways that will take decades to recover from, if it all (can't do much if emigrants take their talents to China instead of the USA).

Strong "cut off your nose to spite your face" vibes. Hope that works out for you. It's not working out for many of my colleagues, especially early-career scientists at federal labs who are hemorrhaging from the system, often moving completely out of science altogether. Great return on investment we're getting for all those GRFPs!

Is China actually particularly interested in allowing non-Chinese foreigners to immigrate there ostensibly to do science but really so they can permanently settle in China and have children who are considered fully Chinese under law?

Yes. Myself and colleagues used to get outreach fairly regularly to join new faculty at universities trying to establish themselves in China. I'm in industry these days, but some of my colleagues report a significant uptick in these types of outreach over the past year.

> It's the coordinated dismantling of structural components of America's innovation economy in ways that will take decades to recover from,

No, that is just your opinion.

I'm not the big Lebowski but this is the "opinion" of the majority of scientific societies in the US as well as watchdog organizations who have long followed science regulatory and spending action.

It's not exactly new. We've been through this with the crackdown on climate science during the W Bush administration, with sequestration during the early/mid 2010's, and with the budget shenanigans during the first Trump administration. Denying the painfully obvious impact of our contemporary science policy is like fiddling while Rome is burning.

Yeah, I mean it's bad in this really direct, near-term way. But we couldn't keep going the way we were going. It was insane. Pants-on-head retarded. And so my read, and my hope, is that this current period of trouble is the price for getting back on track. Treating truth as something that can be discovered. Funding people and ideas based on merit.

So that is their, possibly biased, opinion.

Pedantry isn't really an admirable trait.

I mean...sucks bro. I can imagine that in much of science, where DEI and the wokeness is unrelated to the things you actually study, it was just lip service. And you were sometimes forced to hire idiots, I guess. But when you study human behavior, it's not just lip service - the DEI edicts, speech controls, etc. are about the things you study.

"90% of the systematic differences in behavior between men and women are driven by biology"

"~70-80% of the variance in intelligence is heritable"

"Your personality is mostly defined by your genes"

"Small-scale societies before modernity were hierarchical and extremely violent, which is why they were successful"

"There are no matriarchal societies at all, past or present"

"Slavery was a human universal until recently. Its end was when a bunch of Westerners were like "Maybe that's wrong and we should stop" - and they forced everyone else"

You know what's also cutting off your nose to spite your face? Getting rid of math classes in public high schools because brown kids do poorly in them. All people are born a blank slate, amirite? So it must be ~~systemic racism~~. And bullshit "research" that was designed (and advertised) to come to that conclusion got funded everywhere. The government was entirely captured by this complete nonsense. And it did a huge amount of damage, not least of which is the reaction to it we are now experiencing.

I can imagine how it just seems like a stupid social game in physics, but if you study humans it's really the meat of the thing.

> Complete nonsense was getting funded in the social sciences and cognitive science / psychology

Man, if you think it was bad now, wait until you learn about lobotomies!

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