A quick report from the world of science and academia.
Strange times indeed. Grant proposals my lab has been working on for months have disappeared. I’m seeing and hearing of several nodes in my network which are in federal positions just disappearing.
I also advise students who are building software products for clients, and of both clients that are government agencies, NASA and US Forest Service, today I have learned that one has essentially cancelled the project at its end stages and the other has been MIA for weeks (Ironically, the cancelled product was a system that would significantly improve the efficiency of a key NASA analysis workflow).
Today I see news that the NSF research experiences for undergraduates, which trains undergraduates to conduct real research and which I personally credit with making me into a scientist, is being shuttered across much of the country.
The grant I’m relying on to complete my PhD is on shaky ground according to people close to the problem, and I fear that funding cuts could affect the only backup plan I have, which is continuing working as a teaching assistant. (A luxurious $15k per year + tuition remission). The key expert on my committee in the tech I’m using is at NASA and I fear for the longevity of his position.
Feels like the government is just dismantling the world I’ve spent my life working to become a part of, and I can’t say that I quite understand why.
I’m in a hard science field with direct applications to societal benefits. I believe that what I’m working on is something many would recognize as important. And I also think there’s a pretty clear link between training people who do this sort of thing (STEM generally) and national wellbeing and competitiveness.
I could understand this all better if it was just Trump doing it alone. Sort of a lower class rebellion against the educated class. But what really has me confused is the fact that it’s being spearheaded by Musk and “tech” people.
When DOGE was first announced I thought, great! I deeply dislike Trump but maybe this will make it actually be quite worth it in the end if we can fix the behemoth of government and make it more efficient. Maybe the country will be able to start to build things again, like the tech guys say, it’s time to build! But what we got was quite different from that hopeful version of me had in mind. SV types spearheading the dismantling of the US institution of science. That was not on my bingo card! Why was this the first move of DOGE? Noah Smith argues that it’s an ideological purge rather than an attempt at efficiency, and I guess that makes sense. Ultimately science funding is quite small potatoes in the federal budget. So why is it among the first major target of the administration and DOGE?
I don’t want to catastrophize here. Science in the US is being weakened and downsized, and somewhat purged for touchy topics, but it’s not being destroyed. I’ll probably be able to pull through and finish my program, at least that’s my current hope.
Yet it seems quite obvious to me that these moves are going to significantly weaken the US against competitors such as China. Science has its flaws, but it’s still the secret sauce of western societies’ success and a key part of the economic engine. I’ve always thought of Elon Musk as a big picture, long term thinker who understands the role of science and technology in human advancement. So I’m at a loss for why he would direct focus onto weakening science in the US as among his first moves if his interest really is with the medium to long term success of the US.
There’s a sense in which this is a consequence of the nuclear family model. When children grow up, they move away and create their own life away from their parents, and the now grandparents end up with very little familial social support. Once they finish working, they have no role in society. In other cultures, the grandparents play a large role helping their children with child rearing and maintaining the household. But nuclear families struggle to involve them in a way that’s sufficient or fulfilling for them. Thus they go off to create new social ties among their cohort.
This creates freedom and individualism for the young, but puts high burdens on working parents, and for the old it means that you’ve got only a shadow of the role that the grandparent generation traditionally had.
There is also an environmental/industrialisation angle (the ideal of ruralised life in Florida and the reality of ersatz parades and lawns).
This is way apart from your point and so I’m sorry, but Florida has a really interesting dynamic, where conservationists and ranchers have teamed up against urban/suburban development.
Florida has a huge influx of people (1000/day, they say), and is a very hot market for developers. Ranchers tend to preserve Florida as at least it was since the Spanish arrived 500 years ago and started herding cattle there. The open spaces can still hold a lot of biodiversity and provide some important ecosystem services (especially regarding water filtration and runoff) for the population. Thus, ranchers and environmentalists have teamed up.
This unlikely association (tending to fall on opposite sides of heated debates elsewhere) formed a coalition that effectively advocated for a long time for the Florida Wildlife Corridor to be signed into law, which it finally was last year.
As a blue tribe biologist whose forays across the United States often lead into red tribe lands, Florida conservation issues were the place where I saw most blue-red cooperation of anywhere I’ve been. Working alongside cowboys and wealthy city conservatives buying ranches to hold them against development to be part of the FWC, a very bold conservation proposal (biggest conservation corridor in the country) made by blue tribe conservationists, negotiated with red tribe ranchers, and signed into law by a conservative government, it was an interesting dynamic.
An article on this:
https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/09/11/florida-ranch-habitat-conservation
Jesweez
5mo ago
His recent obsession with acquiring foreign territory is really strange. It’s been two weeks, and already there’s 4 or so territories that he’s consistently talking about trying to take.
I don’t know but I’m starting to set my assumption toward there being something even more wrong with his brain than I previously thought rather than him doing this in a posturing way or to get some kind of outcome.
I know Trump is just uniquely Trump but even for him this is getting pretty out there.
But he has to let go of the idea that he will get all of the land back. There is no universe in which the Putin regime stays and power and this happens, unless Ukraine achieves some military miracle. At an absolute minimum, the eastern Donbas is gone.
Minor note but obviously someone isn’t going to fold and throw away their entire negotiating hand in a war during a podcast.
the pro-Ukrainian discourse that I have observed has been horrendously poor. Disappointingly, Zelenskyy continued this. On the other hand, Putin's speeches were highly intellectual and several levels above any speech I have ever heard a Western leader give in terms of sophistication
The sophisticated version I’ve heard is simply that since the end of the big war, European nations have not attempted to conquer one another or to annex each other’s territory. Europe thus has a historical interest to make it as hard and consequential as possible for any nation which attempts to do this.
Meanwhile, Putin’s frame where historical claims of great civilizations and uniting the ethnicity through territorial annexation is important has historically resulted in horrific and likely unending bloodshed on the European continent.
For anyone on the western side to begin discussing the problem from within Putin’s frame is already to cede ground to his worldview.
Instead Zelensky has cast him as a naked assed barbarian who lives in a world of historical tribal claims rather than the modern world based on the principle of territorial sovereignty.
Zelensky did however lay out the historical context of Ukraine. The nation who gave up nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees which were subsequently not respected. That has significance. He also in my opinion could have painted the broader historical picture for westerners of why Ukrainians have historical reasons to resist domination under Moscow. Something about one of the largest man made famines in human history? I’m not sure how big a part of the Ukrainian psychology that event is. He probably could have done a better job here.
But in the end as @TequilaMockingbird says, conquerors of territory often operate on some great historical mythos in their own head. However even so, there still may be reason to consider them naked assed barbarians whose concept of grandeur isn’t compatible with the interests or frame of the rest of the world. Simply having a grand theory of history doesn’t correlate well with being a force for good in the world. It’s quite often the opposite.
Jesweez
4mo ago
I’ve semi doxxed myself on this platform by saying what I work on before, so I don’t really mind doing it again.
I work on developing models that estimate the water content of vegetation from satellite imagery. This has direct relevance for fire risk forecasting, and I use it to study where droughts affect forests most.
You can judge for yourself the usefulness of this, but also, I think the thinking generally reflects a wrong perspective about where benefit in science comes from.
Some systems are weak link chains, and others are strong link chains. The quality of a weak link system depends on the strength of the weakest link, and the strongest is somewhat irrelevant. An example of this is food safety inspection. One key mistake and the mission is a failure.
However, science is more of a strong link system. There can be a lot of low quality papers, sure. But really the benefit we gain from science arises from top quality research that gets done. You can have 100 people doing low impact research, but if you get out of that investment even one big breakthrough, it can be very worth it.
The problem here is that science is sort of a blind search as well, we don’t know where big breakthroughs might exist. Who would have been crazy enough to say that studying Gila monster venom would lead to one of the most important drug class discoveries in the 21st century. You might say, ah ozempic type drugs, who cares, I’m not fat. But maybe the next unexpected discovery reverses Alzheimer’s, who knows. Maybe you are destined to get Alzheimer’s, at that point, would have been nice to have some strange new drug class that combats it.
Saying, “hey, random PhD student, I don’t think your work is that important in the end and thus I’m fine with weakening science in the United States across the board”.. it’s certainly a position one may take, but I’d say it is not at all a smart one regarding human or national advancement.
Jesweez
2yr ago
Tyler Cowen published an analysis of the “new right” today.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/classical-liberalism-vs-the-new-right.html
He illustrates the new right as a reaction against two factors: the pretty crazy level of what we’ve come to call wokeness on the left, and the capture of most of the main cultural institutions by the same left.
At the same time, there are signals that the woke left is declining in power and relevance (not quite a sure thing yet, but he lists a few signs that we’re trending this way).
Tyler does a good job in my opinion of fairly representing the views of the new right, while also laying out his own disagreements with the philosophy. These center around the idea that the new right is unlikely to be able to create a high trust society. Indeed, since 2016 we have had a precipitous decline in trust in our society, and while almost no one would disagree with this, the different sides would place the blame on different factors.
He finishes the piece:
The polarizing nature of much of New Right thought means it is often derided rather than taken seriously. That is a mistake, as the New Right has been at least partially correct about many of the failings of the modern world. But it is an even bigger mistake to think New Right ideology is ready to step into the space long occupied by classical liberal ideals.
Overall I think it’s an important piece and potentially a lot of the more thoughtful members of the new right might get a lot out of reading it.
Political movements often do a good job at identifying problems in society, but it’s usually their own internal quirks and flaws that end up being magnified if and when they do come to power. Politics tends to progress as these flaws become exposed, as one side reacts against the excesses of the other, and vice versa.
Whatever the case may be, it leads one to wonder whether the woke left and the new right are short term aberrations, specific to what will be looked back upon as a short period of time, or whether these are indeed the feedstock of long lasting ideologies that we’ll be stuck with.
Was it Scott Alexander who back in the day wrote an essay about how liberal values are optimized for times of peace and abundance and conservative values are optimized for a zombie apocalypse scenario?
I’ve pretty much incorporated that into a lot of my perception of politics.
The role of conservatives is often to point at something and say that it is dangerous and should be given more due attention.
As a normie lib I often have the reaction of the poster you quote, but also I have to say there have been times that over time I came around to the conservative position that “X represents a danger that we should be more wary of”.
My best example is how I used to be pro-decriminalization of hard drugs in the early 2010s when much of the rhetoric was based around the failure of the war on drugs. I was also pretty liberal about homelessness. But now I’ve come around to the conservative position that we should crack down on those things to preserve the public space for normal people.
Other fronts of the culture war are for example conservatives telling me I should be more afraid of immigration.
But it doesn’t always line up. I think conservatives should be more afraid of climate change, for example. Particularly if you don’t want lots of immigrants coming.
But this does line up with the original essay, being concerned about preserving the environment is something from a peace and abundance mindset, not a survival among dangers mindset. If you’re in a total war for example, the effects your bombs have on the environment don’t fucking matter!
Another one I’m trying to square is COVID. I think the fault line there was through the axis of societal cooperation vs individualism but it’s still interesting to me… for example my very conservative grandfather who had lung cancer refused to take any preventative measures and subsequently died from COVID. Here was a case where as a liberal I was predisposed to point out dangers and recommend caution but as a conservative this was anathema to my grandfathers nature.
Jesweez
2yr ago
America's credibility in foreign policy was never lower (in the 21st century) than the start of 2022.
I mean, the whole lying to our allies about WMDs was probably a much bigger credibility blow.
Even now Putin uses Iraq rhetorically as precedent for aggressive invasions.
Jesweez
2yr ago
I read something today which I have long thought deep down, but hadn’t really seen spelled out elsewhere.
Namely, the censoring done by the liberal left, while there, is rather mild in the scheme of things and is probably much less than the same left would be censored by the people it currently censors if that group was in power.
The quote that brought it to my mind was from here, on Richard Hannania’s substack. After a post discussing being banned by Twitter, he drops this at the end of the article.
The right-wing whining in particular gets to me, and another motivation here is I don’t want to end up like my friends… I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/saying-goodbye-to-twitter
The attitude of censoring opponents seemed to have crystallized for the left around 2016, where I distinctly remember the conversation centering around the limits of tolerating intolerant ideologies. (Which seems to have become fully settled by now, interesting to observe an ideological movement update in real time in that way).
Does Hannania have a point here? Is the issue that the right takes offense with censorship itself, or would the right if it actually gained back power censor in a much more strict and comprehensive way?
Jesweez
6mo ago
This is true, however I’d just point out, uncontacted tribes in the Amazon usually do have contact with other tribes.
The word used in countries where these tribes are typically found is more accurate, people who are in “voluntary isolation”.
Not saying this to make any point one way or another, just because the subject interests me.
Jesweez
10mo ago
Sex ed is surely good but this is also like saying that D.A.R.E. programs will be a magical solution to all drug use because once you sat through a school program, now you automatically make good choices.
This is a good post, although I think you’re going to face pushback on that conformist name.
The conformists seem to be the ones who keep “not-conforming” to the structures of their day?
Then once they do create an alternative belief structure, historically those beliefs tend to splinter into a million little factions and flavors. E.g. Protestantism and socialism.
Jesweez
5mo ago
I think we should at least mandate that tech companies provide the ability to opt out of maximally addictive features.
For example, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, to an extent X, basically every social app has adopted the “infinite scroll of short video reels” that makes TikTok so addictive.
You used to be able to opt out of automatically being shown “shorts” on YouTube. However, they’ve taken away that option.
Instagram, used to be a place where photography enthusiasts post their pictures. Now it’s an attention on screen maximizer using algorithmic suggestions and infinite scroll short videos.
I read a book recently which if anyone is curious I can link the name, but basically identified that a problem with the digital age is that all of our digital tools and utilities come built in with distraction maximizing features. An article tries to shove 3 videos and 4 advertisements with maximally weird looking photos in my face while I read it. A currency exchange rate app is showing me ads. Everything that I do is trying to grab and divert my attention.
Some people say it’s choice, e.g. it’s my choice to use instagram for example. And I could always go for a dumb phone. Yes, but. The choice has largely been engineered out of my environment. And I believe we should mandate the ability to opt out of addiction and attention maximizing features on the tools and the so called town squares of our digital age.
Jesweez
10mo ago
There’s a whole cadre of risk averse people who have been putting a damper on all discussion of geoengineering for decades now.
But I think that we will roughly follow the path that’s laid out in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future: we hold off on geoengineering right up until some large scale tragedies happen which are clearly as a result of climate change and then use that as a watershed moment to start spraying stuff in the atmosphere to try and defend ourselves.
The risk reward logic for whoever might start doing it doesn’t work out until there is some terrible event to point to. We prefer the status quo and need a big attention grabbing event to justify any type of big actions that deviate from it.
Of course, once we do start doing it, it’s unlikely we’ll scale up carbon capture technology to truly make that much of a difference IMO, so it’ll just be a game of doing this forever or else deal with the termination shock.
A rational approach would be different than this but our psychology makes a waiting-around-and-then-rushed-panicky-reaction strategy more likely.
Imagine an alternate world where any time a kid expressed suicidal ideation, government employees would firmly nudge them towards euthanasia, and would jail you as a parent for protesting
I don’t know if it’s naïve, but I’ve always sort of assumed that transition is something which gets recommended after years of therapy where someone is consistently exhibiting being gender dysphoric.
I’m curious because I think this is a key point where left assumptions and right assumptions tend to diverge. Left assumption: you talk about gender dysphoria with a therapist and they evaluate you for a long time to make sure it’s actually there and is affecting your life in a severe way before recommending any life altering treatments. Right assumption: any old kid reads something online about gender fluidity, experiments with the idea for a short phase, the doctor algorithm says, dysphoric, boom here’s some hormones to take.
Idk which one it looks more like in reality.
Like, I think it’s fine that people transition, but I also know it’s easy to basically trick psychologists until I get prescribed Adderal. Right? So ideally transition would be there but you’d have to spend a huge amount of time and commitment to get anybody to open up the door where it’s locked up at.
That feels to me like a place where some common ground can be found? But maybe I’m also naïve there too, lol.
This is part of a bigger suspicion that all of our problems are solvable by understanding that there are fractions of truth claims in what both sides tend to offer, but it’s very unpopular to say so because we immediately perceive the other side as the worst consequences of their way of thinking rather than looking for where there is a bit of truth in what they say.
Isn’t it just because Hungary represents a European country which went right wing authoritarian, and that’s important if your worldview values western liberal democracy?
(Or if you’re a socialist it’d be salient too. Liberals and socialists make up the core mainstream Reddit users).
Jesweez
4mo ago
“The number of centi-millionaires ($100 million net worth) in the world has more than doubled in the last 20 years and now stands at 28,420”
Edit: reading your other response you were looking for catastrophic impacts on humans, which isn’t the main point of what I wrote, but I’ll keep it up because I think it’s an interesting subject.
The chytrid fungus pandemic has taken a staggering toll on amphibian life around the planet. Probably the most impactful invasive species in the world from the standpoint of affected species and proportion of global biodiversity.
White nose syndrome is another fungal epidemic that has decimated bat populations across North America.
Fun finding, there’s a study connecting the collapse of bat populations to increased infant mortality. Bats consume copious amounts of insects. When they disappear, farmers have been found to increase their use of pesticides in affected counties. These pesticides have medical implications for humans.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg0344
Another example with a more direct human impact, the disappearance and near extinction of the American Chestnut. Once was among the most prized and useful tree in North America for both its wood and its nuts. It was among the most common tree across eastern forests. In the early 1900s, chestnut blight arrived from Asia and essentially erased the species from the North American landscape within a decade.
Other invasives like cheatgrass generate much higher fire risks in the west, and aquatic invasives such as zebra mussels are extremely expensive for management organizations to deal with. The latter can reorganize entire food webs when introduced and end up having impacts on local economies such as fisheries.
Seems like something that’s still in place today to an extent.
People of the multinational upper class often feel more kinship with one another even though they’re from different countries than they do with the lower class people in their own country.
This is honestly true in my own life. I’m in grad school. My friends are from all over the world. I have a lot more in common with them although they’re from Iran and China and Ecuador than I do with people even in my own family in the US who never left their hometown and whose thinking and interests in life are very foreign to my own.
It’s sort of a self sorting by intellect and interests.
I gather this is what is meant by “globalists”.
the entire project of 19th century European nationalists was essentially the convincing of high IQ individuals to stop identifying as part of a multinational imperial elite and start identifying with poor farmers who spoke the same language
Is what the intelligent wing of the modern right wants basically equivalent to what the old European nationalists were trying to do?
Jesweez
10mo ago
Visually, Trump looked flustered and irritated the whole night. Importantly, he barely even looked at Harris, just started straight ahead for almost the whole night.
Meanwhile Harris had dominant nonverbals. From walking straight up to him on his side of the stage and catching him off guard, to staring at him while he spoke.
On content, Trump got baited several times and also made some unprovoked errors. Harris stuck to the points she wanted to make, seemed to effectively get across the message she intended to get out, and landed a few memorable lines. I don’t recall anything that could be considered a mistake from her.
She wins the debate and comes out of it seeming more competent than I think a lot of people had penned her.
Jesweez
10mo ago
In the book it’s a heat event greater than survivable wet bulb temperatures in India. Once the grid goes down, 20 million people die over the span of a few days.
India reacts by unilaterally deciding to begin solar geoengineering and declares any attempts to stop it as an act of war.
I don’t know how likely an outcome like this is. (The death number is definitely pretty crazy).
But who knows. We are just at the beginning of climate change after all.
One paper that does raise my eyebrows quite a bit is this, estimating that by around 2070 1-3 billion people will be subject to hot climate conditions currently only experienced by 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface (currently represented by just a few parts of the Sahara).
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1910114117
At best that really messes with the economy in those places and the pressure to emigrate skyrockets.
I think humans usually surprise me by our ability to deal with extreme heat. But also, tolerance to any environmental stressor is a threshold function, things can look okay while stresses mount until suddenly at certain threshold we see more dramatic impacts. (Example, rising floodwaters are not a big deal right until the moment the water rises to the level of your front door, then costs/damages suddenly rise dramatically).
I think Lex Fridman’s interview with Kanye West was an amazing example of this.
If you know anything about Lex Fridman, the guy is obsessed with reading about the horrors of history and taking it very seriously. He’s also Jewish and of course had a family history of experiencing everything that went down in Europe. But it’s almost secondary to how much he reads and tries to understand why humans commit atrocities. Very serious person about these issues. It’s gotta be a core trigger for a person like this to make light of what happened in WWII, or the Soviet Union, etc.
So he interviews Kanye, and with this background, you just know that every time Kanye says something like “Jewish media” — there’s pits full of bodies flashing behind Lex’s eyes.
But man does he keep it stoic. He even gets personally attacked during the interview. Equated with the Jewish media and everything! Later goes on to confess that it hurt him when Kanye lashed out at him. But throughout the entire thing, you can tell he’s striving with every ounce of himself to be open and calm and understanding/compassionate to the human in front of him, while also being true to his own principles and calling out the bullshit where he sees it.
Kind of an inspirational example of not allowing yourself to shut down into angry/closed off mode, in my opinion.
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