Hacker News Reader

Comment by Escapado | Hacker News Reader

Not a US citizen. From the outside it looks like the US administration simply does not care about advancing science and technology or care for their citizens or their future very much. It looks like it cares about furthering wealth and influence of the head of the in-group by means of fear mongering, scape goating and dismantling structures that threaten this agenda. And if there is a penny to save and a misinformation campaign to further then it makes sense why you would want to take out the voices of treason. But maybe I just misunderstand the whole situation.

View on HN

It looks like that from inside the US too. At least, to a lot of us.

I’d agree, and I’d add “by both sides”. The erosion of rigor and exceptionalism under the progressive mentality has been profoundly damaging as well. Both sides seem so driven by a culture war circle jerk that they have totally lost the plot in term of academic mission.

I’ll add, the perverse incentives of publish or perish is also responsible for an aimless and irresponsible churn that lead us into the reproducibility crisis. So really the ship has been falling apart in every regard for a very long time. Not it’s just impossible to ignore. Not to mention, the obvious cost and waste of the institutions and life ending debt… it’s just all a mess

I agree that the opposition has lost the plot, but to depict that as anywhere approaching this administration’s level of grift, extreme anti-intellectual (invent-your-own-reality) stance, or what I’ve seen described as “the cruelty is the point” is like comparing a schoolyard bully to a serial killer.

There are absolutely invent your own reality aspects of the progressive agenda. I mean, there’s a massive international story on the front pages of papers yesterday and today. They are absolutely off in fantasy land.

Where you’re right is that the rights attach is, well, that… an attack. The cruelty IS the point.

The progressives are just bumbling do gooders who push things too far. But this is kind of treating them with kiddie gloves. Again, look at the major international story today.

The right is trying to tear something down that they see as broken.

Both parties are, as usual, culpable and ignorant of their own contributions to the degradation. They are both childish in their own way, and both willing to put themselves and their beliefs before the mission of academia, which of course, if not about “you” (them)

As others have said, this is about deliberate reality-destruction.

Scientists are notorious for believing in things like observable reality, truth, scientific and academic integrity, etc. That puts them in opposition to the people currently running the US government — who absolutely do not want "experts" pointing-out the deficiencies in their policies and scams.

Ron Suskind's quote of a Bush2-era politician sums it up:

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'." [1]

Trump etc want to create a non-reality reality in which their grift and social engineering are so normal that they're unnoticed. Their contempt for, and dismantling of science, is part of that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

Essentially Brandolini's Law with a serving of dumbed-down-for-managers OODA-loop in action; all together essential ingredients for any cook specializing in post-truth dishes. Shake it well with learned helplessness and plenty of distraction-providing scapegoats, e. g. minorities, and your got a splendid poison stew people will line up for. Before they are lined up, in one fashion or another.

Scientists are also notorious for being ideologically infiltrated by authoritarian or totalitarian ideologies/regimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism The Soviet Union was convinced that collectivism was the ultimate form of human society and organization. Lysenkoism fed their biases, and Soviet Agrarian scientists struggled to point out the new collective experimentation by the government was a disaster (a similar problem was faced by Chinese scientists and Bureaucrats trying to implement Mao's great leap forward). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology Nazi Germany was convinced they were the greatest race on Earth, that Jews and Slavs were sub-human. Phrenology promised them a way to determine racial purity and back it up with scientific results. The scientific community brought us lobotomies and eugenics too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com