Rendered at 17:13:02 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
oh_my_goodness 24 hours ago [-]
Please understand that the goal of these policies is to weaken scientific research in the US. The people who push this stuff acknowledge openly that they oppose science, experts, and accurate information. This isn't a misunderstanding or a fumble.
SubiculumCode 21 hours ago [-]
My job depends on NIH continuing to function, but it is not immediately clear that this particular decision follows other worrying trends discussed here previously. Removing K-awards for clinical trials (but not regular, cheaper study formats) might simply be a recognition that clinical trials are too expensive for the K-format and conducting underpowered clinical trials does not help anyone much.
bdangubic 18 hours ago [-]
might simply be is exactly right, very unlikely… and knowing what you know and have seen since Jan of 2025 you know how slim that “might” is
a-french-anon 9 hours ago [-]
Please, for your own sake and that of your ideals, don't fall into a Disney adult mentality of "these are bad guys who are clearly against Truth and Good^tm!" just because righteousness feels good. This falls under underestimating your enemy and never serves the people embracing said feeling.
Nextgrid 23 hours ago [-]
Can anyone explain the reasoning behind it? I can understand (not saying I approve) targeted opposition to specific scientific claims to favor commercial interests (climate change denial to favor oil & gas, etc), but wouldn't a general anti-science movement make the country less competitive in the long run and directly hurt industries like pharma/etc?
curt15 19 hours ago [-]
A body of independent subject matter experts who command public respect is anathema to authoritarian governments. It's why authoritarian takeovers frequently start by targeting major universities.
kraken_cult 17 hours ago [-]
Except we both know they weren't really that independent though... This was on HN a few days ago https://archive.is/Ayf4R
amelius 20 hours ago [-]
To make it easier to push "alternative truths".
I think the plan might be to reinstate science in some form after they have grabbed full control of the country.
bonoboTP 19 hours ago [-]
"Alternative facts" vs "other ways of knowing". Great choices that America has. Objective science is off the table for both camps.
tancop 9 hours ago [-]
It's recognizing thats science is not the only valid form of knowledge vs pushing fringe theories that claim to be science but don't follow the expected standards.
The definition of pseudoscience is something that a) claims to use the scientific method and b) is not actually doing it properly. The "other ways of knowing" you talk about don't meet the first condition, but the right wing "alternative facts" do. Saying climate change is fake is a testable claim that contradicts mainstream science. Saying it's caused by spiritual corruption is not because anything supernatural is out of scope by definition.
Science limits itself to the predictable, testable, natural, objective (if you believe in that) parts of the universe because otherwise it would be useless. If the answer to any question can be "because God wanted it that way" then all theories end there. That doesn't mean science denying the existence of God, just indifferent to it and all other spiritual beliefs. A theory that depends on a religion being false would also not count as scientific.
"Other ways of knowing" is an expression used for indigenous knowledge with elements of both science and spiritual views. Nobody is saying that it's fully science or should be treated as such, just that we should respect it and treat it as equal. I don't see how that could be equivalent to anti vax conspiracies.
gpm 22 hours ago [-]
Punishing apparent ideological enemies is a long standing mechanism for fascists and dictators - and scientists in the US qualify. It's an attempt to make people fear standing against them.
Destroying sources of truth is a long standing goal for those who want people to act against their own interest, and scientists are a source of truth. It's shrinking the pie so that the republican leadership can capture a much bigger slice of it.
bigbadfeline 21 hours ago [-]
> but wouldn't a general anti-science movement make the country less competitive
It's not "a general anti-science movement", it's about tight control, everything else is unimportant.
> directly hurt industries like pharma/etc
Not a problem if tight control is in place.
eli_gottlieb 20 hours ago [-]
> wouldn't a general anti-science movement make the country less competitive in the long run
Less competitive for tertiary industries like tech, pharma, etc. More competitive for lower-level industries like mining, resource extraction, low-tech and labor-intensive manufacturing, etc. The Administration represents the latter economic sectors. They want more people in factories and fewer people in offices.
numpad0 21 hours ago [-]
I know this isn't HN type of a topic or a comment, but looking at US from outside, the theme looks to be explicitly destroying US hegemony and meritocracy...
What I feel to be a common denominator for Trump, Thiel/Musk, and MAGA types, is that they are the people who "otherwise wouldn't have been chosen" for one reason or another. I've had stupidly engaged in a pointless argument with MAGA type people on some anonymous forum, and what I slowly realized is that a lot of them fail to hide having an okay picture of the actual reality when absolutely cornered and pushed hard, with the caveat that the chances for them getting any win whatsoever by embracing some alternative, conspiracy, false narratives is above zero, whereas the same for not doing so is at very most zero. There have been news reports of Bill Gates and Elon Musk both having engaged in quite some reprehensible acts on some island, but Gates would still always come first on headlines whenever they would be in a photo together. This would be contrast to how media universally reports Musk throwing the Nazi salute(which is the worst I've seen in any media that unironically makes me wonder how a real neo nazi would pause, exhale, say "you know," and shut up in German on camera reviewing it), which do yield a bunch of single name headlines. They would not have a chance of getting dopamine hit standing straight on both feet and looking straight ahead uttering all the correct words. Destroying everything that gets in the way to end this their "suffering" seem like the goal to me.
I mean, there's a very succinct and less nice word for that group of people that begins with the letter in the middle of the logo under the crown for the Dutch royal airline, but that word doesn't feel like it captures the verticality of this phenomenon.
b40d-48b2-979e 21 hours ago [-]
It was never a meritocracy. That's a lie to keep the workers in line.
numpad0 13 hours ago [-]
Doesn't really matter. It works and keep this tall column of guys out. So probably not just workers. They don't like that. Call them narcs or psychos or autistic but I don't think the boring machine is catching too many of those guys.
deadbunny 21 hours ago [-]
Narcissist doesn't start with L...
999900000999 20 hours ago [-]
Reality has a well known liberal bias.
For example, the Security of War recently had a well produced video saying we're going to do anyway with vaccine mandates for the military.
>Hegseth announced in late April that he was making the annual flu vaccine voluntary for service members "effective immediately." In a video posted to social media, Hegseth said requiring people to get vaccinated was "overly broad and not rational."
>By early May, all military departments had formally requested exemptions that allow them to keep requiring flu vaccinations for certain service members, and those exemptions were granted in early June, according to the congressional staffer. The exemptions typically apply to vulnerable populations like people who live in communal environments, healthcare workers and other categories, the staffer said
Trying to understand conservative thought is to go into a bizarre twilight zone where vaccines cause autism, do more harm than good, and at the same time our " adversaries" deliberately created illnesses which can be prevented by vaccines.
Then again, maybe the illnesses are designed to get more people vaccinated, in order to spread autism.
Behind it all.
Big Train of course.
qsera 10 hours ago [-]
>Trying to understand conservative thought is to go into a bizarre twilight zone where vaccines cause autism
And to understand this thought is to go into the other twilight zone where "vaccine" is a single thing with a single composition with only a single set of properties and effects on the organism.
18 hours ago [-]
tty456 21 hours ago [-]
They're deliberately weakening the U.S. Treason.
spwa4 23 hours ago [-]
... who are unfortunately backed by a large part of the US population who have elected them on exactly that promise, for various reasons. From fear of vaccines to having various other nations freeride on US research.
That so many people think like this is the underlying problem.
The issue, I think, is a large number of people don't realize the NIH or NIS exists or know what they do.
I think most people support them once the realize exactly what they are doing. How could you not when "They research treatments for diseases" is basically all they do.
bonoboTP 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
gr_norm 23 hours ago [-]
> The Great Cause diverts all the money to itself.
Be very specific about exactly what you mean here, with links to reputable sources. You're making extraordinarily strong accusations; vagueness does not suffice to convince.
mindslight 22 hours ago [-]
Dignity is the fundamental problem that they're bemoaning. When scientists and other intellectual positions are funded beyond scraps and subsistence wages, they use some of the breathing room to start to asking questions about societal power structures. When they're afforded political voices, they start applying their critiques to how their own institutions are run - rather than keeping their heads down as "efficient" worker bees for the business vectoralists. And critiques/conclusions where they've gone cloyingly overboard then serve as convenient straw men that demonstrate how "out of touch" they are from "the real world".
bonoboTP 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
gr_norm 23 hours ago [-]
Then be ignored. Your subjective feelings bear nothing on the question of science funding.
23 hours ago [-]
kingleopold 22 hours ago [-]
Please understand that so many high IQ tech and science people support this, they voted and decided.
analog31 19 hours ago [-]
I'm surrounded by scientists, in my family, at my day job, and in my community, as I live in the shadow of a major research university. Support for the current administration in recent elections has fallen somewhere between slim and none. In fact I can't think of another identifiable group of people who have been more unanimous in their opposition.
On the other hand I can't defined "tech" people, but maybe someone else can. I don't lump "tech and science" together as a single group.
Disclosure: Scientist.
SamoyedFurFluff 22 hours ago [-]
Why did many high IQ tech and science people vote for their own defunding? I’m not asking out of anger I genuinely don’t get it. Culture war issues like, idk, people becoming more brown by default in America, or a trans teenager participating in a game, they’re… they don’t seem as important as ensuring well funded science??
spankibalt 21 hours ago [-]
> Why did many high IQ tech and science people vote for their own defunding?
The list is long. First and foremost, it's never a good idea to forget that wherever there's intelligence there's always also stupidity. Then it's generally good advice not to confuse intelligence for wisdom. And between this and very long lists of cognitive biases, there's always the good old "Fuck ya, got mine!" Rule of Acquisition to remember. Et cetera.
virtue3 21 hours ago [-]
good ole Rule of Acquisition #1 - Once you have their money, you never give it back.
etc-hosts 22 hours ago [-]
current administration is guided by the looniest of the loons Claremont Institute, who truly believe that any dollar not spent on border defense or offensive military capability is wasted.
emj 17 hours ago [-]
They continue to support him, you have lots of republicans here they see him as at best a lesser evil.
I am sure I just naive, I guess we can hope all the international bad will is going away with Trump.
plastic-enjoyer 20 hours ago [-]
> Why did many high IQ tech and science people vote for their own defunding?
Because a high IQ and a science degree does not mean that those people make good political decisions. A lot of political decision making is driven by ideology and identity.
A lot of high IQ people may have strong mathematical and problem solving skills, but are morons in absolutely every other aspect of life.
nemomarx 22 hours ago [-]
Lots of voters didn't believe Trump would do the things he campaigned on. "I'll defund research" can be interpreted as "probably that other research, the stuff I don't like or think is useless" by some.
cute_boi 21 hours ago [-]
There are many reasons. Many high IQ people don’t want to lose their jobs and favor stricter immigration policies. They would probably vote for Democrats if Democrats weren’t so lax on immigration.
And, many of my friends who were doing PHD they used to follow dems, but are now supporting republicans after they got citizenship....
fnordpiglet 22 hours ago [-]
Many is a misnomer for “some.” The current administration won by a plurality, 49%, not even a majority. This was 32% of possible voters. Of people with a PhD, approximately 30% voted for Trump. Of Trump voters 1% had a PhD.
This is still many people, but only in that “many” is more than a “few.” It’s not the case that most people voted for Trump, or even most voters. Or even most phds who voted. 70% of phds who voted didn’t vote for Trump.
This is why they are facing political retribution. He is creating suffering for revenge, the national interest be damned. Trump is more interested in the credulous, easily manipulated, low knowledge and easily conned masses. Many high IQ tech and science people are them, but not most. There are probably a few that aren’t easily manipulated and are instead just self serving sociopaths buying influence and contracts - but compared to the scale of the nation, this is indeed a few.
gpm 22 hours ago [-]
30% doesn't seem anywhere near as low as it should be though... I'd say that qualifies as "so many".
That said I question both your and grandparents choice to look at only people who chose to vote. 68% of people who could have voted against this did not - either actively supporting it with a vote or deciding that they didn't give a fuck if it happened by not voting. Every potential voter either knew or ought to have known the result of this election result...
CamperBob2 21 hours ago [-]
The truly sobering statistic is that after all we've seen, 39% of the electorate still approves of him.
afpx 21 hours ago [-]
They should be incentivizing researchers who have histories of publishing research that has been independently replicated. Way too much fraud going on that’s seeping into the real world.
WhitneyLand 20 hours ago [-]
Why would you bring up fraud in the midst of science research in the US being burned to the ground?
Fraud is not the reason it is happening. Even the people who are making the cuts in this case have clarified the purported reason and it has nothing to do with fraud.
afpx 15 hours ago [-]
There are too may bad scientists, and I don't want to fund them. When the sciences became status-oriented, group-think and profit-seeking became the norm.
This administration is trash, but I'm still tired of paying taxes to fund jokers.
If your 'science' is so important, then any other country in the world will be happy to scoop you up. gtfo
Just one example out of many: Today, I looked up research on EMDR treatments. Major problems in replication for things outside of PTSD. Yet, therapists are told by their boards to push the treatment for all sorts of things.
Have many of you actually looked at a lot of the garbage funded by NIH?
YeahThisIsMe 21 hours ago [-]
The fraud is the point with this administration.
smallmancontrov 20 hours ago [-]
Who has time to talk about billions in emoluments and pumping+dumping the American Economy to insider trade war news when we are subject to such calamitous fraud as a wet-behind-the-ears PhD getting overly enthusiastic in their grant proposal?
fastaguy88 19 hours ago [-]
There is a fixed (decreasing) budget for research.
What should be the balance between repeating things that have already been done, and expanding knowledge?
tancop 9 hours ago [-]
Why is it decreasing when the economy is growing? That's the real question. Maybe it's something to do with austerity and wealth concentration in the hands of rich investors?
SubiculumCode 20 hours ago [-]
Frankly, this is a bit of an ignorant take.
1st, K-awards are specially meant to provide a funding path to support an early career scientist to continue in the field. Expecting that another team has already replicated the early work of a young scientist is not realistic. They are just starting out.
2nd. If you want replication, you got to fund replication. Researcher money doesn't appear out of nowhere, so make the decision, increase the science budget with a new replication budget.
3rd. Yes there is some fraud. Always has been. Is it more than before? Maybe? But unless you count paper mill journals that no serious scientist reads, it is much smaller than pop media makes it out to be.
afpx 5 hours ago [-]
Why should the fruits of our labor be taken to pay for some rando’s job training? If they actually had any potential, they wouldn’t need job training and certainly wouldn’t need average people to pay for it.
I’ll think of the poor researchers once we get the homeless in my hometown of Pittsburgh down to zero. Currently, real people matter more to me.
epistasis 24 hours ago [-]
It's hard to overstate how chaotic and mismanaged NIH has been in the past two years. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, so it's hard to impute motives here.
A lot of labs are being defunded for no good reason, losing researchers, losing the thread, and putting entire directions of useful research on ice, likely forever.
There are some clear indications of where it is pure malice and not mere incompetence though. Sean Eddy is a foundational figure in my field of research, like a Hubble:
I'm going to call it malice. Either way the people running the government now are the avowed enemies of functioning institutions. No need to give these freaks the benefit of the doubt.
(See Russ Vought's comments about putting all government workers in trauma just for one and he's head of OMB.)
SubiculumCode 20 hours ago [-]
It's not the regulars at NIH. If anything they are pulling more unofficial overtime than ever before to try to compensate for what is coming from on top and what DOGE destroyed
nielsbot 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, I am not impugning the normal career staff--I mainly assume they're there for the opportunity to serve the public.
tokioyoyo 23 hours ago [-]
From the outside, I can see how they want to revamp the institutions with hopes to accelerate timelines, and reduce waste. But it’s also funny because it’s not something that can be achieved in a span of 4 years and without long term goals/objectives/process changes/changing the pipelines/etc.
I’ve mentioned it in the past as well, but everything that US has done in the past looks like as a knee-jerk reaction to China’s achievements. That being said, I sincerely hope they can compete in advancing the tech and research, since competition is good for the world.
nielsbot 9 hours ago [-]
> From the outside, I can see how they want to revamp the institutions with hopes to accelerate timelines, and reduce waste.
That's just a cover story--don't be fooled.
jjtheblunt 23 hours ago [-]
> At 60, Eddy had planned to continue working through the next decade with his team. "For someone of my career stage, this is probably not recoverable," he says.
Why doesn't he continue his research inside big pharma?
jltsiren 23 hours ago [-]
Big pharma is not like Bell Labs of old. Their researchers are expected to do work their bosses consider productive. They have no need for people who want to do curiosity-driven research and release the results to the public.
userbinator 21 hours ago [-]
Big pharma is not like Bell Labs of old.
Then maybe this is a sign that things should change back towards that direction.
epistasis 21 hours ago [-]
Even Bell Labs would not be doing the type of research that is necessary. Look at all the innovation in science that happened back then! Bell Labs was an outlier but it was not the primary driver of science by any means.
userbinator 21 hours ago [-]
You're right, there were many other companies doing it too. General Electric, General Motors, Sylvania, etc.
epistasis 21 hours ago [-]
That's not what I was saying. The foundational research that built the massive economic engine of the current US did not come from industrial research.
userbinator 20 hours ago [-]
The "massive economic engine of the current US" is certainly the result of large companies' research. They have all been very open about that, so do you have any proof to the contrary?
More examples: IBM, Kodak, Xerox...
jjtheblunt 16 hours ago [-]
Did you overlook the transistor?
Built at Bell Labs in 1947, getting a Nobel prize for Bardeen, Shockley, and Brittain a few years later?
It's hard to think of a part of any economic engine that doesn't rely on transistors for the last many decades.
mindslight 20 hours ago [-]
Sure - but it's a moot point unless you're proposing plausible ways of achieving that, and that could be adopted by a movement with credible political power.
epistasis 23 hours ago [-]
They are not similar types of research. It's like asking why Knuth doesn't do systems research for a social network or advertising company.
Eddy's lab builds the tooling and concepts that everyone else uses throughout the field in foundation upon which new discoveries are built.
There's no commercial funding for that sort of work, and I'm honestly shocked at the lack of understanding of this is Silicon Valley. Nobody at Google or Meta or anywhere is given free reign to build the future of science of even computer science, all activity there is for the express commercial benefit of the company, exactly as it should be.
jjtheblunt 22 hours ago [-]
I see what you're saying, and think it makes sense.
Anecdotally, Apple (thinking different(ly)?) ran at least two pure research inner groups that i was in contact with when I was in engineering at Apple; to your point, I have no sense of impact on profits from doing that.
tialaramex 20 hours ago [-]
Sometimes an organisation has what I would call "Vanity Hires". People hired not because they really make much sense as part of the organisation but because their celebrity "rubs off" on the org by association.
These can be very transactional, they take your money and if they have a notional place of work (not so necessary in the era of WFH) you give them a broom closet somewhere as an "office" which they will never visit.
Or at the other end of the spectrum they try to actually be helpful, perhaps because they actually did want to do whatever it is you wrote on the hiring paperwork, and this might even be a productive relationship, at worst it's a distraction for anybody whose interest you've struggled to maintain and don't want to let go. Hey, go help uh, Doctor Frankenstein with his project to (checks notes) invent a new machine to replace Geese for some reason.
Given Apple's wealth I'd expect some mix of "Vanity Hires" and people who really are expected to do important strategic work for the $$$. As I described, to some extent you can't tell. If you've never heard of them, maybe that's just because you don't know their area of expertise, and equally even if they seem to be working their backside off, maybe they're just like that and Apple was astonished that they actually showed up and started working.
stonogo 14 hours ago [-]
Big pharma won't hire anyone they can't push around. This means people who expect decent salaries and only working forty hours a week need not apply.
23 hours ago [-]
sixothree 22 hours ago [-]
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is malice.
dgellow 23 hours ago [-]
Why would you ever give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt after the past 10y? They’ve been more than clear about the fact they want to destroy federal and scientific institutions (other than ICE of course)
pvaldes 31 minutes ago [-]
Once is gone, is gone.
Scientists (and common people) should strike back and fund a political party in the next week of being fired. Or two, or five. If all your voting options lead to your death, create new options.
That, and only that, would send the correct message. A message than the current dinosaur politicians will hear. Every scientist fired and interviewed should casually mention the idea of thinking about creating a new party as the only way to solve this crisis.
somethinsfishy 22 hours ago [-]
Derek Lowe sees darker motives in the program of cuts to Federal research grants in NIH and NFS. I don't know how to fix some of the problems with how and to whom grants are awarded, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater, deliberately, looks like the very bad kind of malice. (I think this article may have been referenced on HN.)
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/assault-science-fu...
sixothree 22 hours ago [-]
If I had been told a foreign adversary had broadly infiltrated our government at the highest levels, I would have a hard time differentiating between that and what is currently happening.
Arodex 20 hours ago [-]
There is little need for a foreign adversary - the USA is incredibly anti-science for a supposed "first world" country. They are still debating teaching creationism, for decades now. Even in the doldrums of Europe, you don't have that kind of retarded stuff.
jmcgough 23 hours ago [-]
We're seeing a generational loss of young talent that will be hard to reverse. PhD grads who would normally stay in the US after graduation are returning to their home countries. My American post-doc friends have had funding for cancer research, Alzheimer's research, Parkinson's disease; some have left the US, others are making plans to do so.
And for what? Any money we "saved" by killing our research pipeline has already wasted in a pointless, self-destructive war.
talon8635 14 hours ago [-]
Your comment has an implication bigger than your point. Returning to their home countries… are there not American PHD at American university? Has the ratio of native to international shifted over the years?
I’m being somewhat sarcastic, given I see an overwhelming representation of internationals in the American grad/phd programs I’m familiar with. But I honestly don’t have insight across every department. I’d be interested what people have to say about this across STEM throughout the country. Anyone have a rough idea on the trend lines?
Bromeo 11 hours ago [-]
Top stem grad programs at US universities have around 50% international students, with Stanford CS, for instance, as high as 68%. This is according to published university data and matches my own observation.
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.
apothegm 22 hours ago [-]
It looks like that from inside the US too. At least, to a lot of us.
talon8635 14 hours ago [-]
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
andyjohnson0 22 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
__MatrixMan__ 20 hours ago [-]
Presumably for the transition of biotech from the US to somewhere else. I don't know what kind of favor buys you the sabotage of an industry, but it must've been a good one.
I think the plan might be to reinstate science in some form after they have grabbed full control of the country.
The definition of pseudoscience is something that a) claims to use the scientific method and b) is not actually doing it properly. The "other ways of knowing" you talk about don't meet the first condition, but the right wing "alternative facts" do. Saying climate change is fake is a testable claim that contradicts mainstream science. Saying it's caused by spiritual corruption is not because anything supernatural is out of scope by definition.
Science limits itself to the predictable, testable, natural, objective (if you believe in that) parts of the universe because otherwise it would be useless. If the answer to any question can be "because God wanted it that way" then all theories end there. That doesn't mean science denying the existence of God, just indifferent to it and all other spiritual beliefs. A theory that depends on a religion being false would also not count as scientific.
"Other ways of knowing" is an expression used for indigenous knowledge with elements of both science and spiritual views. Nobody is saying that it's fully science or should be treated as such, just that we should respect it and treat it as equal. I don't see how that could be equivalent to anti vax conspiracies.
Destroying sources of truth is a long standing goal for those who want people to act against their own interest, and scientists are a source of truth. It's shrinking the pie so that the republican leadership can capture a much bigger slice of it.
It's not "a general anti-science movement", it's about tight control, everything else is unimportant.
> directly hurt industries like pharma/etc
Not a problem if tight control is in place.
Less competitive for tertiary industries like tech, pharma, etc. More competitive for lower-level industries like mining, resource extraction, low-tech and labor-intensive manufacturing, etc. The Administration represents the latter economic sectors. They want more people in factories and fewer people in offices.
What I feel to be a common denominator for Trump, Thiel/Musk, and MAGA types, is that they are the people who "otherwise wouldn't have been chosen" for one reason or another. I've had stupidly engaged in a pointless argument with MAGA type people on some anonymous forum, and what I slowly realized is that a lot of them fail to hide having an okay picture of the actual reality when absolutely cornered and pushed hard, with the caveat that the chances for them getting any win whatsoever by embracing some alternative, conspiracy, false narratives is above zero, whereas the same for not doing so is at very most zero. There have been news reports of Bill Gates and Elon Musk both having engaged in quite some reprehensible acts on some island, but Gates would still always come first on headlines whenever they would be in a photo together. This would be contrast to how media universally reports Musk throwing the Nazi salute(which is the worst I've seen in any media that unironically makes me wonder how a real neo nazi would pause, exhale, say "you know," and shut up in German on camera reviewing it), which do yield a bunch of single name headlines. They would not have a chance of getting dopamine hit standing straight on both feet and looking straight ahead uttering all the correct words. Destroying everything that gets in the way to end this their "suffering" seem like the goal to me.
I mean, there's a very succinct and less nice word for that group of people that begins with the letter in the middle of the logo under the crown for the Dutch royal airline, but that word doesn't feel like it captures the verticality of this phenomenon.
For example, the Security of War recently had a well produced video saying we're going to do anyway with vaccine mandates for the military.
>Hegseth announced in late April that he was making the annual flu vaccine voluntary for service members "effective immediately." In a video posted to social media, Hegseth said requiring people to get vaccinated was "overly broad and not rational."
>By early May, all military departments had formally requested exemptions that allow them to keep requiring flu vaccinations for certain service members, and those exemptions were granted in early June, according to the congressional staffer. The exemptions typically apply to vulnerable populations like people who live in communal environments, healthcare workers and other categories, the staffer said
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/military-flu-vaccine-recruits-h...
See that pesky reality thing.
Trying to understand conservative thought is to go into a bizarre twilight zone where vaccines cause autism, do more harm than good, and at the same time our " adversaries" deliberately created illnesses which can be prevented by vaccines.
Then again, maybe the illnesses are designed to get more people vaccinated, in order to spread autism.
Behind it all.
Big Train of course.
And to understand this thought is to go into the other twilight zone where "vaccine" is a single thing with a single composition with only a single set of properties and effects on the organism.
That so many people think like this is the underlying problem.
I think most people support them once the realize exactly what they are doing. How could you not when "They research treatments for diseases" is basically all they do.
Be very specific about exactly what you mean here, with links to reputable sources. You're making extraordinarily strong accusations; vagueness does not suffice to convince.
On the other hand I can't defined "tech" people, but maybe someone else can. I don't lump "tech and science" together as a single group.
Disclosure: Scientist.
The list is long. First and foremost, it's never a good idea to forget that wherever there's intelligence there's always also stupidity. Then it's generally good advice not to confuse intelligence for wisdom. And between this and very long lists of cognitive biases, there's always the good old "Fuck ya, got mine!" Rule of Acquisition to remember. Et cetera.
I am sure I just naive, I guess we can hope all the international bad will is going away with Trump.
Because a high IQ and a science degree does not mean that those people make good political decisions. A lot of political decision making is driven by ideology and identity. A lot of high IQ people may have strong mathematical and problem solving skills, but are morons in absolutely every other aspect of life.
And, many of my friends who were doing PHD they used to follow dems, but are now supporting republicans after they got citizenship....
This is still many people, but only in that “many” is more than a “few.” It’s not the case that most people voted for Trump, or even most voters. Or even most phds who voted. 70% of phds who voted didn’t vote for Trump.
This is why they are facing political retribution. He is creating suffering for revenge, the national interest be damned. Trump is more interested in the credulous, easily manipulated, low knowledge and easily conned masses. Many high IQ tech and science people are them, but not most. There are probably a few that aren’t easily manipulated and are instead just self serving sociopaths buying influence and contracts - but compared to the scale of the nation, this is indeed a few.
That said I question both your and grandparents choice to look at only people who chose to vote. 68% of people who could have voted against this did not - either actively supporting it with a vote or deciding that they didn't give a fuck if it happened by not voting. Every potential voter either knew or ought to have known the result of this election result...
Fraud is not the reason it is happening. Even the people who are making the cuts in this case have clarified the purported reason and it has nothing to do with fraud.
This administration is trash, but I'm still tired of paying taxes to fund jokers.
If your 'science' is so important, then any other country in the world will be happy to scoop you up. gtfo
Just one example out of many: Today, I looked up research on EMDR treatments. Major problems in replication for things outside of PTSD. Yet, therapists are told by their boards to push the treatment for all sorts of things.
Have many of you actually looked at a lot of the garbage funded by NIH?
What should be the balance between repeating things that have already been done, and expanding knowledge?
1st, K-awards are specially meant to provide a funding path to support an early career scientist to continue in the field. Expecting that another team has already replicated the early work of a young scientist is not realistic. They are just starting out.
2nd. If you want replication, you got to fund replication. Researcher money doesn't appear out of nowhere, so make the decision, increase the science budget with a new replication budget.
3rd. Yes there is some fraud. Always has been. Is it more than before? Maybe? But unless you count paper mill journals that no serious scientist reads, it is much smaller than pop media makes it out to be.
I’ll think of the poor researchers once we get the homeless in my hometown of Pittsburgh down to zero. Currently, real people matter more to me.
A lot of labs are being defunded for no good reason, losing researchers, losing the thread, and putting entire directions of useful research on ice, likely forever.
There are some clear indications of where it is pure malice and not mere incompetence though. Sean Eddy is a foundational figure in my field of research, like a Hubble:
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/21/nx-s1-5828768/science-funding...
(See Russ Vought's comments about putting all government workers in trauma just for one and he's head of OMB.)
I’ve mentioned it in the past as well, but everything that US has done in the past looks like as a knee-jerk reaction to China’s achievements. That being said, I sincerely hope they can compete in advancing the tech and research, since competition is good for the world.
That's just a cover story--don't be fooled.
Why doesn't he continue his research inside big pharma?
Then maybe this is a sign that things should change back towards that direction.
More examples: IBM, Kodak, Xerox...
Built at Bell Labs in 1947, getting a Nobel prize for Bardeen, Shockley, and Brittain a few years later?
It's hard to think of a part of any economic engine that doesn't rely on transistors for the last many decades.
Eddy's lab builds the tooling and concepts that everyone else uses throughout the field in foundation upon which new discoveries are built.
There's no commercial funding for that sort of work, and I'm honestly shocked at the lack of understanding of this is Silicon Valley. Nobody at Google or Meta or anywhere is given free reign to build the future of science of even computer science, all activity there is for the express commercial benefit of the company, exactly as it should be.
Anecdotally, Apple (thinking different(ly)?) ran at least two pure research inner groups that i was in contact with when I was in engineering at Apple; to your point, I have no sense of impact on profits from doing that.
These can be very transactional, they take your money and if they have a notional place of work (not so necessary in the era of WFH) you give them a broom closet somewhere as an "office" which they will never visit.
Or at the other end of the spectrum they try to actually be helpful, perhaps because they actually did want to do whatever it is you wrote on the hiring paperwork, and this might even be a productive relationship, at worst it's a distraction for anybody whose interest you've struggled to maintain and don't want to let go. Hey, go help uh, Doctor Frankenstein with his project to (checks notes) invent a new machine to replace Geese for some reason.
Given Apple's wealth I'd expect some mix of "Vanity Hires" and people who really are expected to do important strategic work for the $$$. As I described, to some extent you can't tell. If you've never heard of them, maybe that's just because you don't know their area of expertise, and equally even if they seem to be working their backside off, maybe they're just like that and Apple was astonished that they actually showed up and started working.
Scientists (and common people) should strike back and fund a political party in the next week of being fired. Or two, or five. If all your voting options lead to your death, create new options.
That, and only that, would send the correct message. A message than the current dinosaur politicians will hear. Every scientist fired and interviewed should casually mention the idea of thinking about creating a new party as the only way to solve this crisis.
And for what? Any money we "saved" by killing our research pipeline has already wasted in a pointless, self-destructive war.
I’m being somewhat sarcastic, given I see an overwhelming representation of internationals in the American grad/phd programs I’m familiar with. But I honestly don’t have insight across every department. I’d be interested what people have to say about this across STEM throughout the country. Anyone have a rough idea on the trend lines?
https://facts.mit.edu/enrollment-statistics/ https://hai.stanford.edu/assets/files/hai_ai-index-report-20...
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
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