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Notes -
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.
I don't have a strong feeling about the social sciences, but NZ is in for a nasty surprise if they think the type of research done in "core science" departments these days is economically useful. Some of the engineering departments are in better shape, but people in the "core sciences" tend to work on flavor of the month stuff that grant agencies think are good (which is often very far from economic usefulness) and then publish large numbers of garbage papers on the subject to inflate their citation counts. It's not clear to me how funding this is any better than the social sciences -- if anything it might be worse because it takes up time, effort, and money from people who might otherwise be doing something useful.
At least the research done in the harder sciences is based on the scientific method and is factual. That alone makes it at least worth doing. I’m sure it’s at least possible to further direct the funds towards useful research rather than fluff, but even fluff has a use case if it’s based on facts rather than being crafted just-so stories about mermaids in literature or the entire fields of gender studies and race studies.
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