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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.
You're putting way too much thought into it. Social sciences are neither social nor sciences, they are sinecures for left-wing nutbags and anyone who funds it is funding their own opposition. It's politically ridiculous to spend tax money on hyper-partisan fake fields that died in the Replication Crisis, but no one has noticed.
Defund all this shit. You'd be shocked how little of the university system you need to train the very few jobs that might actually require a college degree. It's all a bloated jobs program for shitbird lefties who never want to leave the classroom, and a class barrier for the ruling elite. For the working class, it's debt slavery as the price of admission to the middle class.
The most amazing thing about it, was that after the universities were filled to the brim with so many fake degrees, they couldn't employ them anymore, suddenly every company began funding DEI departments. I still can't believe what a coup of a grift that was. And decades of saying "They're just college kids, they'll grow out of it when they get in the real world" was proven wrong to disastrous consequences. Nearly every entertainment property? Ruined. Institutional competence/faith in institutions? Ruined. It's so bad, our President Elect was convicted of 34 felonies, and our nation collectively went "We all know that shit ain't real" and elected him President anyways.
The disillusionment is also just half the issue. The people who haven't become disillusioned may also be suffering direct damage from absorbing whatever fashionable stuff is coming out of academia.
The most scary damage is that universities have been training young people in how to do science. The replication crisis, while bad in itself, also shows that the universities have actually been training young people in how to do science wrong. How does that damage get undone?
The really scary part is we only know about "replication crisis" because there are still old-timers left around who remember how science should have been done. Once they retire, the academia - at least the western one, I have no idea what is happening in China or India - will have bullshitters occupy all the levels and there would be nobody to teach any other way or to object to what is going on. And the public will be under the impression this is how it's done, there's no other way, you have to just trust the experts and if they are wrong sometimes (like almost all the times) it's just how the life is. And even if you feel like something wrong is going on, you won't have any means to express it or formulate it as a consistent critique, unless you go back 150 years and start recovering the science from there (provided the pre-woke sources won't be destroyed or bowdlerized to avoid offense by then).
Ever heard the expression that an empire can only last 300 years?
Enlightenment thought is an empire. Western scientific rational modes of thinking. It only became dominant at some point in the 1700’s and it’s starting to fade.
Deferring to elders who are very knowledgeable in things that got made up at some point is the historical norm. That’s how ‘western medicine’ used to work. That’s how Chinese examinations used to work. Etc, etc.
An empire only lasts for 300 years.
300 years seems to be too low. Romans need to be given at least 500 if we don't count the republican times, and if we do, then we need to add another 100-150 years. And that's not counting Eastern Roman empire which survived till the Renaissance times.
Rome was 3 empires. Principate, dominate, and middle republic, with a christianized late Roman Empire inheriting decline from the dominate. And Byzantium was a continuation of the late (Christian)Roman empire only for the first few centuries; medieval Byzantium called itself Roman but was essentially a new empire(or rather, succession of empires).
The same thing happened in China, with a succession of empires from the same civilization which are clearly more different from each other than mere dynastic differences.
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Rome and Byzantium both lasted more than 300 years.
And the Assyrians. And the HRH. And the Ethiopian empire. And the Carthaginian empire. And...
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