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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.
The academy allowed itself to be hollowed out and started playing politics instead of searching for truth. Yes, hard sciences included.
No, just wanting to keep your head down and “do the science” is not an excuse. I’m sorry for you personally, but academia made its bed and now it will have to lie in it.
The extent of most researchers in the hard sciences' capitulation to progressive ideology is that they filled out the mandatory "broader impacts" portion of a grant application and made up some shit they didn't believe about how whatever they're doing will incidentally improve the lives of women or minorities. It would have been simple enough to remove this requirement from all future applications and most scientists would have been thankful to whichever administration did that. Anyone who had ever been involved with the grant writing process could have told them this.
Denouncing every recipient of such a grant for doing what was required of them to obtain one is akin to punishing everyone in the Soviet Union ex post facto who praised the communist party to keep their job, needlessly making enemies of people who would otherwise be on your side. Should they have had the courage to stand up for their convictions despite the threat of censure or worse? Perhaps, but people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. How many of us here fought the advance of wokeness tooth and nail in every aspect of our professional and public lives, and took all the hits that that entailed? I doubt very many, and this is a place bursting at the seams with reflexive contrarians.
I don't want to throw them in a gulag. But the system that did it has to go away. You get that right? It's not punishment per se. I understand that they don't like it or it negatively affects them. But the institutions have to be destroyed. I don't want these guys in jail or anything. But they'll need to find someone who's not the American tax payer to fund their work. If they are as smart as they think they are, they will be wildly successful in business. If they're not, they will be wildly successful in food service.
Why? Academic science got on fine for generations before woke capture. It's not an inherent consequence of the founding principles. You don't have to hack the arm off to cure an ingrowing nail.
The political process will naturally take any government expenditure and turn it into a patronage program. How are you going to do politics unless you take from your enemies and give to your friends? Since I don't think this thing can remain apolitical, the options are to destroy it or to make it a place to park political allies. Leave it alone isn't a choice.
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No, they won't: that whole "illegal immigrants are harder workers than Americans" thing cuts both ways. Those jobs aren't there for them to take and the various small industrial concerns they could normally do office work for were shipped off to foreign countries 20-30 years ago.
Policies have consequences.
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Why should I believe they didn't believe it? The gatekeepers of the hard sciences were all too ready to expel Tim Hunt (and of course James Watson) from their ranks for violation of that "shit". They were happy to put Alessandro Strumia on the shit-list for opposing it. (and not hard science, but they censured Peter Boghossian for "unauthorized human experimentation" for submitting bogus articles to a woke journal). All public polls say they're strongly aligned with the left on this.
All this is, is taking away the grants which include the praise of Stalin. No one is even being blacklisted.
Perhaps not "tooth and nail", but I fought my battles and took my hits. I certainly never endorsed woke views.
I'm in a hard science academic department. I would guess, in our department, it's about 50-50 those who are supportive vs those who (silently) disagree. We've had DEI speakers at our main weekly seminar (normally for colleagues at other universities who were invited to present their research) and those speakers were praised as "wonderful" by some of our faculty. Our administration requires all applicants for faculty positions to submit diversity statements--plans for how they will promote DEI should they be hired--and these are used in evaluating candidates. One of the members of a recent search committee was a virtual political commissar for DEI. In our last faculty search all males were explicitly excluded (their applications were discarded automatically), on (strongly implied) orders from the upper administration. There are many more such anecdotes. STEM faculty are (statistically) less gung-ho for woke/DEI ideology than humanities or social sciences, but there is considerable support even there.
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If that were all that it was, we would be in a good place. I think a majority of hard sciencers would be completely fine with that. Maybe some small set of gatekeepers at some set of institutions would be unhappy, but kinda who cares? But yeah, that's not all that it is.
No, they wouldn't. Because the majority of them are not even Kolmogrovs, collaborating but not really believing. Most of them are believers. When they were told to add diversity and inclusion to proposals, yes sir. When Trump I appeared #resistance.
The particular thing starting this thread is complaining about impacts to an internship program designed to discriminate against white and Asian men.
I'm going to shamelessly pull the "computer science isn't hard science" card and claim that you probably don't have actual knowledge of this.
That's still not all that it is.
Computer science is mathematics, but its practical applications are very close to the theory, and that has saved it from some of the more embarrassing effects of political capture; there's only so far you can push BS, if it doesn't cash out in working code it won't be respected. That doesn't stop a lot of computer scientists from being true believers and inventing (I don't say corrupting, because that would imply there was a time they were legitimate) whole subfields like "AI safety" which are political.
As for hard science, not only have we seen hard scientists discipline their own for opposing the left, even when the right was titularly in charge, we have not seen some upswelling of support or even relief. No "thank goodness, President Trump is taking away these bullshit diversity requirements which have been weighing on us". We haven't even seen grumbling of the sort "Oh shit, now the new boss is in town and we're going to have to rewrite the proposals to butter him up instead of the other guy". Instead it's "Oh, no, science will end because we're going to lose internship programs for women and non-white-and-Asian males!" And of course there's all those polls of academia showing an extreme left bias, and other polls saying they wouldn't hire conservatives, and that sort of thing.
From what I remember of the early 2000s, the AI safety movement didn't come from academia at all. Am I misremembering?
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I disagree with this - CS is very captured. The close connection between theory and practice might have kept the practice of the discipline close to reality, but the culture has been completely taken over, probably because by its nature, it is so much more "online" than other disciplines. I would speculate that it is probably the most LGBT-friendly discipline on account of its feed-in cohort being primarily online weirdos, support for transgenderism going back to when the graybeards were young, etc. I'd metaphorically bet on it having the highest raw numbers of trans people too (see e.g., the Rust community survey.) The industrial side has also been taken over - see all the codes of conduct, the big tech companies at the forefront of DEI pushes, etc.
This is a discipline that has the ability to cross-cut everything ("software is eating the world") and possibly even invent superintelligence. If you do not share its values, the fact that it is so thoroughly converged is not a happy one.
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Not the way most of your ilk view it. It's about information, use/transfer thereof. They claim to be in charge of information, so of course, they're extremely susceptible to politics. Basically every part of it. Even the politics that you like (the libertarian-bent crypto folks, for example). It's all politics, through and through. Not so with the hard sciences.
I was all sorts of ready for relief, until approximately day one of when that relief was supposed to come, and instead, all and any hard science was suddenly on the chopping block. "Cut it all, indiscriminately," I keep hearing over and over again. I would have loved to have some relief. I would have loved to cheer on the clean-up of any problems. I was genuinely excited. But those hopes were swiftly crushed. We got chemotherapy instead. I don't know how much you know about chemotherapy, but ya don't actually feel relief when you get the first dose. Like, maybe it'll work in the long run; I don't actually know yet. But it would be pretty dumb to unilaterally decide that someone needed chemo, force the drugs into them, then turn around and say that you're actually justified in just killing them entirely because they're not showing relief yet.
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