Comment by Vaslo

> 100% support (10s of millions of Americans do) many of these cuts

I doubt "10s of millions of Americans" can describe the core functions of the NIH

> when scientists are hired because they know someone, or are part of some “group” rather than being the best choice.

How do you think new appointees and hires in the NIH/HHS are selected? Political loyalty seems to be a better predictor than scientific impact or output.

> Also not interested in funding anything not research related, including various “offices” that have nothing to do with supporting research. Lots of things to like about these cuts.

The cuts and changes are dramatically impacting research support. Grant money is not being disbursed at the same rate since the new review changes began. You can more plainly characterize the changes as harmful to research in general than focused on removing whatever specific things you don't like.

The political right is obsessed with minimizing Type II error. They feel it's better to miss good research results than to have the wrong people performing the research or chasing the wrong ideas to start with (a false negative) and the further to the right they are on the spectrum, the more important minimizing the wrong people and ideas becomes. This leads to less discovery and successes because more research gets falsely rejected at the funding level.

The political left, of course, is the opposite and obsesses over Type I error. Accepting the wrong people and ideas is less important than getting good results. This leads to things like Lysenkoism, but also tends to reject less successful research, given the other checks and balances built into a healthy system.

You know so little about this, ad it is terribly frustrating to me. Scientists have been made out to be villains, when, on the whole, these are some the hardest working, most motivated people you will ever encounter.

I'm pretty sure only a small fraction of grants gave this issue, and the cuts have meanwhile being very wide, without any sort of intelligent approach (I know ppl doing stuff like material science at nasa that now have nothing to do because they cut costs of various inputs, while the very expensive lab equipment is sitting there now unused)

Can you cite any stats or studies that show that this is happening in any substantial amounts? This seems to be one of those "it just makes common sense" when the underlying data is ignored or assumed.

>100% support (10s of millions of Americans do) many of these cuts when scientists are hired because they know someone, or are part of some “group” rather than being the best choice.

Prove it. Prove this happens at a large scale. This is just nonsense talking points.