My main take on the whole thing is that more people should have read, and taken seriously, the entirety of Eisenhower's farewell address, and not just the bit about the military-industrial complex. He was entirely correct about both of the problems he points out tight coupling between the government and universities causing, all the "educated" people ignored that part because it was inconvenient, if they were aware of it at all, and now we are witnessing the fallout, in various forms.
"In that framework, the only thing that really matters is short-term political power.... You’re trying to make sure that you are in control of the levers of power when everything goes vertical, and that’s all that matters."
And yet, the same people seem to be (or in some cases, to have become after previously recognizing the opposite) completely unaware of the challenge of making sure *any human at all* can actually *remain* in anything we'd recognize as "control" in such a scenario.
While I have searched diligently for the link without success, I’ve recently read a claim, supported by numbers showing a very large increase in papers withdrawn for fraud or not be reproducible. Also, grants are reportedly biased toward safe, incremental steps, rather than higher risk breakthrough efforts. If true, change is desperately needed.
The situation is analogous to education spending. Large amounts of money haven’t resulted in any improvement in results. To be reluctant to spend many millions for no significant benefit isn’t sensible. Fresh eyes there, in contrast to Birx, Collins, and Fauci, are appropriate for disruption of present policies and interests are needed.
I doubt there’s a huge increase in fraud in US science, though I think we should expect an increase in irreproducibility as “low hanging fruit” gets picked and the “most published research findings are false” effect gets stronger. (Quickly: most potential hypotheses are false; statistical methodology ensures that true hypotheses that are tested usually find significant effects, but 5% of false hypotheses that are tested also find significant effects; but as true hypotheses get exhausted from the pool, 5% of false hypotheses starts to overwhelm the number of true hypotheses; so most individual publications are false, even though the literature still tends towards truth.)
Another overwrought pean to a shibboleth. "Science" these days is mostly done privately, not by partisans at universities. With any luck, the grantsters will be defunct in a few years.
Am I the only one who doesn't know what "the singularity" is? Armageddon? The Second Coming? If it's the Second Coming, why bother cutting the government?
The private sector has funded lots of really important applied science and technology. But consider fundamental science of the sort done by the following government-funded scientists:
I can think of one scientist of comparable importance who wasn't primarily government funded: Darwin, who was partly church-funded, partly amateur, but even his key work came from a government project (voyage of the Beagle).
In fundamental science, through the hundreds of years the above scientists worked, governments were much smaller than they are today, and the private sector funded no scientists of comparable importance.
Only the government has enough money to support scientific research at current scale.
You could conceivably switch the funding from federal to state level, IFF you're ok with scientific research at Washington University (St. Louis), Stowers Institute (Kansas City), Duke University, Cincinnati Children's Hospital, every University of Red State, etc. going bye-bye.
Back in the days of Vox, Matt proposed the government funding "moonshots." Say, promising one billion dollars to any private pharmaceutical company that invented a cure for cancer.
It'd require the private entities to actually have long term plans and make investments based on uncertain rewards which is not what they do. If ponying up for science was something they were going to do, they already would have, and in any case making them the funders would eliminate much of the common benefits scientific research is supposed to provide.
RFK Jr’s brain is clearly in hock to the naturalistic fallacy. That’s the common thread that links all his beliefs, both the bad (anti-vax, anti-nuclear, pro-quack) and the good (get artificial colors and other wacky chemicals out of our food).
Part of why the naturalistic fallacy is so persistent is that a simple heuristic of “natural good, unnatural bad” does in fact lead you in the right direction sometimes. Unnatural foods really do tend to be bad for you! But it becomes dangerous when it leads people to deny the reality that sometimes nature is not your friend. Infections are natural… and deadly.
I disagree that "unnatural" foods tend to be better for you. My super-processed vegan protein powder "ice cream" with two types of fake sugar is much better for me than a similar amount of lard.
Great post on things that I think are really important. Thanks! A few thoughts from a researcher:
1. The biggest issue is the damage done to US research capabilities by people who have lots of hostility and no clue. However...
2. in the spirit of trying to be open to the other side, there would sometimes be advantages to a cost-neutral reduction in indirect costs. This would transfer money from administrators who allocate indirect costs to the researchers who write grants and run labs. Sometimes this would be good, because a good funding process (a) minimizes partisan dealing to one's friends/institutional allies, and (b) maximizes highly-informed scientific judgement. In these ways, the scientific culture in the US (where I now work) is better than the culture in New Zealand (where I'm from). When reviewing grant proposals, large US funding agencies can eliminate folks with even vague conflicts-of-interest while still compiling review panels with genuine expertise. This is harder in New Zealand [NZ panels satisfying (b) often violate (a), since NZ researchers within a field often have many interactions with each other]. Since individual institutions are small, allocating indirect cost money within institutions negates the US scale advantage. I'm not in medical research, and I can think of cases where reducing indirect costs would do major damage. But I've seen a high proportion of inefficient vanity projects funded through indirect costs. If indirect cost reduction were done in a cost-neutral way, it would transfer money away from administrators, who would complain loudly, but sometimes it would be good.
3. It's unlikely to be done in a cost-neutral way.
4. I'm a non-citizen working in environmental science. Fear, not about professional status but about immigration status, is affecting good scientists I know whose work has gained media attention, and who are non-citizens working legally in the US. Professional advancement is sometimes political everywhere, but fear concerning immigration status is different. This fear is more of possible future actions than of anything that's happened so far, but I think it's is natural, and not crazy.
I think the core problem with universities at the moment is that STEM disciplines, and certain more scientific social sciences like Econ and Psychology, make much more sense within the traditional conception of universities than the humanities do. That is, as research-first institutions that employ highly specialized researchers who are entrusted to seek for truths that may eventually be of some benefit to society at large, but not necessarily in the immediate future. This insulates them from the pressures of day-to-day politics and business and such, making the isolation of the ivory tower a genuine boon.
With the humanities, there is no north star in the same sense. Postmodernism has totally undermined any notion that humanists CAN discover truth in an objective sense, and whether we accept postmodernism or not, it has become hegemonic in the academic humanities and shows no real signs of waning. Despite this, many humanists have taken it upon themselves to repackage various modernist ideologies like Marxism or to invent new ideologies like wokeism in order not just to better understand or make sense of society, but to positively reform it. How they ground their beliefs about what kind of reform would be more just is extremely unclear, but a strategic or temporary suspension of their postmodern, relativist convictions seem to be common and necessary moves. (It may also be that insofar as relativism makes all frameworks equally false/all things equally good/bad, to show preference for one over the other becomes indefensible, making "equality" the only plausible postmodern ethic. I think that relativism makes even this ethic untenable, but perhaps not everyone sees things that way.)
Even if we accept that humanists COULD agree on a set of basic, objective moral frameworks, their insulation from the world in the ivory tower is a detriment, and leads to absurd schemes like communism or various forms of wokeism, which of course rarely if ever survive contact with the real world.
It also becomes difficult in a postmodern, relativistic humanities to truly justify things like the freedom of faculty to choose who is hired. If the humanities are chiefly means of articulating to young students at colleges what it is that we as a culture value, how can the extreme bias towards left/progressive views in the humanities be justified or sustained? Why should scholar-monks in the ivory tower be permitted to make decisions about what we think young elites should know and value?
Great post! Also, although I haven't seen the stats, I've heard that France's elite universities are famous for intergenerational intrenchment of a tiny ruling elite, and I wonder if this might explain the emergence of their stratospherically abstract postmodernist critical theory. For all the talk about "overcoming prejudice", if someone doesn't assume their own culture's superiority, they have to discipline their ideas with logic and evidence. I wonder if this might have been uncomfortable for generations of elite French academics.
Horrendous decision making is a pretty common issue with non-democratic regimes. Go read up on the Khmer Rouge, North Korea, Maoist China or even older examples like Nero. Obviously what Trump has done so far is not as bad as those, but the obviously insane and counterproductive choices fall into that general pattern.
It's absolutely stunning the way the Trump administration took some reasonable critiques and ran with them allll the way off the wingnut cliff.
Yes, the Democrats/progressives went too far with "men are toxic" --> let's revel in our support for outright a-holes, misogynists, and rapists!
Yes, Democrats went overboard with DEI stuff --> HULK SMASH ANYTHING RESEMBLING DEI!
Yes, science has become politicized and full of liberals --> HULK SMASH SCIENCE!
Yes, some government spending is bloated and inefficient --> let's feed government agencies into the wood chipper and joke about it on Xitter!
Yes, illegal immigration is unpopular and Democrats should have done something about it sooner—> let’s disappear some legal immigrants to an undisclosed location in Louisiana or a sh*thole prison in El Salvador!
Some people are actually concerned about folks on the other side of the political spectrum being too extreme. Other people are actually extremists themselves who see extremism on the other side of the spectrum as a positive good and an opportunity to empower themselves to run wild.
Above the diplomatic incentives of scientific spokespersons, there was a definitely period of time in where the cool thing to do as a scientist was to be studiously apolitical and above it all. Not unlike parts of the tech world today.
But sustained attacks on science from the right politicized scientists, who felt compelled to defend themselves. Intelligent Design, Climate Denial, Austerity, COVID Denial, Vaccine Denial, and DOGE. Today's GOP is not particularly pro-nuclear, pro-GMO, or pro-tech anyhow.
My main take on the whole thing is that more people should have read, and taken seriously, the entirety of Eisenhower's farewell address, and not just the bit about the military-industrial complex. He was entirely correct about both of the problems he points out tight coupling between the government and universities causing, all the "educated" people ignored that part because it was inconvenient, if they were aware of it at all, and now we are witnessing the fallout, in various forms.
"In that framework, the only thing that really matters is short-term political power.... You’re trying to make sure that you are in control of the levers of power when everything goes vertical, and that’s all that matters."
And yet, the same people seem to be (or in some cases, to have become after previously recognizing the opposite) completely unaware of the challenge of making sure *any human at all* can actually *remain* in anything we'd recognize as "control" in such a scenario.
While I have searched diligently for the link without success, I’ve recently read a claim, supported by numbers showing a very large increase in papers withdrawn for fraud or not be reproducible. Also, grants are reportedly biased toward safe, incremental steps, rather than higher risk breakthrough efforts. If true, change is desperately needed.
The situation is analogous to education spending. Large amounts of money haven’t resulted in any improvement in results. To be reluctant to spend many millions for no significant benefit isn’t sensible. Fresh eyes there, in contrast to Birx, Collins, and Fauci, are appropriate for disruption of present policies and interests are needed.
This sounds like something that might be at Retraction Watch: https://retractionwatch.com/category/by-reason-for-retraction/not-reproducible/
I doubt there’s a huge increase in fraud in US science, though I think we should expect an increase in irreproducibility as “low hanging fruit” gets picked and the “most published research findings are false” effect gets stronger. (Quickly: most potential hypotheses are false; statistical methodology ensures that true hypotheses that are tested usually find significant effects, but 5% of false hypotheses that are tested also find significant effects; but as true hypotheses get exhausted from the pool, 5% of false hypotheses starts to overwhelm the number of true hypotheses; so most individual publications are false, even though the literature still tends towards truth.)
The problem is that to 99.999% of people, science and the information it has has provided as to how the world works, is just "magic".
Another overwrought pean to a shibboleth. "Science" these days is mostly done privately, not by partisans at universities. With any luck, the grantsters will be defunct in a few years.
What do you mean? Can you give any examples of privately done science more recent than Darwin or Mendel?
Am I the only one who doesn't know what "the singularity" is? Armageddon? The Second Coming? If it's the Second Coming, why bother cutting the government?
I think this is the reason science should decouple from government. It corrupts both science and government.
If the government did not take as much in taxes, the money would be available for private organizations to do the research.
But they wouldn’t do it, given that most of the benefits are to the public, not the funder.
The private sector has funded lots of really important applied science and technology. But consider fundamental science of the sort done by the following government-funded scientists:
Newton, Einstein, Schrodinger, Euler, Born, Pasteur, Gauss, Faraday, Plank, Maxwell.
I can think of one scientist of comparable importance who wasn't primarily government funded: Darwin, who was partly church-funded, partly amateur, but even his key work came from a government project (voyage of the Beagle).
In fundamental science, through the hundreds of years the above scientists worked, governments were much smaller than they are today, and the private sector funded no scientists of comparable importance.
Only the government has enough money to support scientific research at current scale.
You could conceivably switch the funding from federal to state level, IFF you're ok with scientific research at Washington University (St. Louis), Stowers Institute (Kansas City), Duke University, Cincinnati Children's Hospital, every University of Red State, etc. going bye-bye.
Back in the days of Vox, Matt proposed the government funding "moonshots." Say, promising one billion dollars to any private pharmaceutical company that invented a cure for cancer.
I kid you not, but USDA is putting $1b into lowering egg prices (including avian flu vaccines - for chickens!).
But $1b to come up with a cure for cancer won't make a dent. The National Cancer Institute (part of NIH) has a budget of over $7b/year alone.
You can't decouple from money, and somebody's always providing the money.
It is less dangerous if it does not all come from one place.
It'd require the private entities to actually have long term plans and make investments based on uncertain rewards which is not what they do. If ponying up for science was something they were going to do, they already would have, and in any case making them the funders would eliminate much of the common benefits scientific research is supposed to provide.
Much of the research is already done privately.
Trump says Doge is coming to an end in the next couple of months. Thank goodness. I am hoping my investments recover soon after.
RFK Jr’s brain is clearly in hock to the naturalistic fallacy. That’s the common thread that links all his beliefs, both the bad (anti-vax, anti-nuclear, pro-quack) and the good (get artificial colors and other wacky chemicals out of our food).
Part of why the naturalistic fallacy is so persistent is that a simple heuristic of “natural good, unnatural bad” does in fact lead you in the right direction sometimes. Unnatural foods really do tend to be bad for you! But it becomes dangerous when it leads people to deny the reality that sometimes nature is not your friend. Infections are natural… and deadly.
It even extends to his view on the poor maligned natural HIV virus, and the bad evil vcr cleaners gay people inhale that give them AIDS.
Though I don’t remember what he thinks about steroids or any of the goop store unnatural things.
I disagree that "unnatural" foods tend to be better for you. My super-processed vegan protein powder "ice cream" with two types of fake sugar is much better for me than a similar amount of lard.
wtf is "the singularity"?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
Great post on things that I think are really important. Thanks! A few thoughts from a researcher:
1. The biggest issue is the damage done to US research capabilities by people who have lots of hostility and no clue. However...
2. in the spirit of trying to be open to the other side, there would sometimes be advantages to a cost-neutral reduction in indirect costs. This would transfer money from administrators who allocate indirect costs to the researchers who write grants and run labs. Sometimes this would be good, because a good funding process (a) minimizes partisan dealing to one's friends/institutional allies, and (b) maximizes highly-informed scientific judgement. In these ways, the scientific culture in the US (where I now work) is better than the culture in New Zealand (where I'm from). When reviewing grant proposals, large US funding agencies can eliminate folks with even vague conflicts-of-interest while still compiling review panels with genuine expertise. This is harder in New Zealand [NZ panels satisfying (b) often violate (a), since NZ researchers within a field often have many interactions with each other]. Since individual institutions are small, allocating indirect cost money within institutions negates the US scale advantage. I'm not in medical research, and I can think of cases where reducing indirect costs would do major damage. But I've seen a high proportion of inefficient vanity projects funded through indirect costs. If indirect cost reduction were done in a cost-neutral way, it would transfer money away from administrators, who would complain loudly, but sometimes it would be good.
3. It's unlikely to be done in a cost-neutral way.
4. I'm a non-citizen working in environmental science. Fear, not about professional status but about immigration status, is affecting good scientists I know whose work has gained media attention, and who are non-citizens working legally in the US. Professional advancement is sometimes political everywhere, but fear concerning immigration status is different. This fear is more of possible future actions than of anything that's happened so far, but I think it's is natural, and not crazy.
I think the core problem with universities at the moment is that STEM disciplines, and certain more scientific social sciences like Econ and Psychology, make much more sense within the traditional conception of universities than the humanities do. That is, as research-first institutions that employ highly specialized researchers who are entrusted to seek for truths that may eventually be of some benefit to society at large, but not necessarily in the immediate future. This insulates them from the pressures of day-to-day politics and business and such, making the isolation of the ivory tower a genuine boon.
With the humanities, there is no north star in the same sense. Postmodernism has totally undermined any notion that humanists CAN discover truth in an objective sense, and whether we accept postmodernism or not, it has become hegemonic in the academic humanities and shows no real signs of waning. Despite this, many humanists have taken it upon themselves to repackage various modernist ideologies like Marxism or to invent new ideologies like wokeism in order not just to better understand or make sense of society, but to positively reform it. How they ground their beliefs about what kind of reform would be more just is extremely unclear, but a strategic or temporary suspension of their postmodern, relativist convictions seem to be common and necessary moves. (It may also be that insofar as relativism makes all frameworks equally false/all things equally good/bad, to show preference for one over the other becomes indefensible, making "equality" the only plausible postmodern ethic. I think that relativism makes even this ethic untenable, but perhaps not everyone sees things that way.)
Even if we accept that humanists COULD agree on a set of basic, objective moral frameworks, their insulation from the world in the ivory tower is a detriment, and leads to absurd schemes like communism or various forms of wokeism, which of course rarely if ever survive contact with the real world.
It also becomes difficult in a postmodern, relativistic humanities to truly justify things like the freedom of faculty to choose who is hired. If the humanities are chiefly means of articulating to young students at colleges what it is that we as a culture value, how can the extreme bias towards left/progressive views in the humanities be justified or sustained? Why should scholar-monks in the ivory tower be permitted to make decisions about what we think young elites should know and value?
Great post! Also, although I haven't seen the stats, I've heard that France's elite universities are famous for intergenerational intrenchment of a tiny ruling elite, and I wonder if this might explain the emergence of their stratospherically abstract postmodernist critical theory. For all the talk about "overcoming prejudice", if someone doesn't assume their own culture's superiority, they have to discipline their ideas with logic and evidence. I wonder if this might have been uncomfortable for generations of elite French academics.
a bit surprised ``they secretly made a deal with an ai to take over humanity'' isn't a critique that has been aimed at the abundance folks yet.
Horrendous decision making is a pretty common issue with non-democratic regimes. Go read up on the Khmer Rouge, North Korea, Maoist China or even older examples like Nero. Obviously what Trump has done so far is not as bad as those, but the obviously insane and counterproductive choices fall into that general pattern.
It's absolutely stunning the way the Trump administration took some reasonable critiques and ran with them allll the way off the wingnut cliff.
Yes, the Democrats/progressives went too far with "men are toxic" --> let's revel in our support for outright a-holes, misogynists, and rapists!
Yes, Democrats went overboard with DEI stuff --> HULK SMASH ANYTHING RESEMBLING DEI!
Yes, science has become politicized and full of liberals --> HULK SMASH SCIENCE!
Yes, some government spending is bloated and inefficient --> let's feed government agencies into the wood chipper and joke about it on Xitter!
Yes, illegal immigration is unpopular and Democrats should have done something about it sooner—> let’s disappear some legal immigrants to an undisclosed location in Louisiana or a sh*thole prison in El Salvador!
It's beyond painful to see.
Some people are actually concerned about folks on the other side of the political spectrum being too extreme. Other people are actually extremists themselves who see extremism on the other side of the spectrum as a positive good and an opportunity to empower themselves to run wild.
Like socialists who saw Trump's election as an opportunity to overturn the Democratic Party the way he did the GOP.
"With crisis comes opportunity."
Above the diplomatic incentives of scientific spokespersons, there was a definitely period of time in where the cool thing to do as a scientist was to be studiously apolitical and above it all. Not unlike parts of the tech world today.
But sustained attacks on science from the right politicized scientists, who felt compelled to defend themselves. Intelligent Design, Climate Denial, Austerity, COVID Denial, Vaccine Denial, and DOGE. Today's GOP is not particularly pro-nuclear, pro-GMO, or pro-tech anyhow.