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Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences:
Frankly, they're going in the wrong direction. A great deal of technology developed over the last 30 years (social media, generative AI, frankly the internet itself) is either neutral/mixed at best or actively harmful at worst. If anything we need to be putting the brakes on "high-tech, high-productivity" jobs. Diverting funds to university social science departments would be a good way of slowing things down, at least. Despite my substantial disagreements with the wokeists, I'm willing to fund them if they can act as a counterbalance to a complete takeover by utilitarian techbroism.
I don't trust big tech to honestly evaluate the impacts and effects of their own products. We need a neutral, or even outright adversarial, independent body to investigate issues like say, the effects of social media on teenage mental health, and the university seems as good a place to do it as any (it might be objected that such research falls under the heading of "psychology" or maybe even "economics" rather than "social sciences" - but I doubt that the people in favor of these cuts would be particularly friendly to psychology or economics departments).
There are certain legitimate and even pressing research topics (e.g. psychological differences between racial groups, impact of racial diversity on workplaces, etc) that fall under the heading of "social sciences", but which are unfortunately impossible to investigate honestly in today's climate of ideological capture. The ideal solution to this would be to simply reform social sciences departments and make them open to honest inquiry again, rather than destroying them altogether.
Are they effective as a counterbalance, though? I'm yet to see a "utilitarian techbroist" excess that the SJ movement could not be made to acquiesce to in return for assurances that it will be wielded in the interest of their political goals, and in fact what seems to happen is that every time such assurances are made (ex: any social media opinion-management tech) the would-be counterbalance becomes another hard obstacle to overcome if you want to put brakes on the technology (ex: the "freeze peach" meme, fielded by SJ in defense of Big Tech getting to do what they wanted to do anyway).
In general, it seems pretty counterproductive to hope for an incumbent ideological movement to rein in an incumbent technological one. As long as the concerns of temporal and spiritual power are orthogonal, they are naturally complementary to each other; what you are proposing is akin to wanting to check a medieval absolute monarchy by investing in the priesthood.
Honestly i'm surprised the founders of google are alive. Weekly meetings in front of the whole campus in a building anyone could tailgate into with no security. Lots of secluded lines of sight to the stage...
I guess noone hates them that much. Well. That and I think those company-wides ended in 2019?
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