Comment by Rebuff5007
13 hours ago
> whether there are black holes at a redshift of 10 or not is not a partisan issue.
Anything that depends on a basic understanding of the scientific process, and resulting scientific facts is absolutely a partisan issue right now.
> now
Let's not pretend politics wasn't meddling with science before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524049
It certainly is when people are typing the word "black" into the search field when deciding what programs need to be cut...
To be honest, research funding turned stupid before DOGE. I remember talking a guy who was struggling to write the mandatory diversity statement for a grant in quantum computing.
Whatever diversity sections were required in grant proposals are nothing compared to the situation right now.
If your guy couldn’t say stuff like we will do outreach to local CCs, will design summer research programs, etc, then they’re just not a very good grant writer
Seriously. I hope everyone understands that this literally happened at a massive scale. So many projects were killed simply because the project name had a word on the banned words list. The idiots at doge and elsewhere have simply ctrl+f searched "woke" terms and ended projects without the faintest idea of what they were killing. All in the name of saving negative federal dollars.
And the real partisan question is ”should the US fund studying the black holes”, not the actual science question
Which really tells you more about the state of mind of people asking that question. What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence, or the nature of the physical reality they live in (and yes, by "being curious" I mean "being willing to put a tax dollar amount to them")?
>What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence
A person who struggles to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, for one.
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A person who’s been told all the people doing the science look down on them. Partially true, too, based on how I’ve heard people talk about ”dumb redneck trump voters”
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That's foolish. There is certainly an amount of money on funding research that is unreasonable! Determining where that line should rest is an inherently political question. Determining who should get funding for that is also a political question. The latter question was able to be papered over for many years because the scientific community generally contained roughly equal members of both parties. Since that isn't true any longer now "science" is getting treated like interest group just like all the other groups within the country. It's definitely going to hurt the country in the long run, but acting like this wasn't going to happen eventually when the university system purged itself of moderates and conservatives is foolish and obscures the part of the problem that came from the universities themselves.
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At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they thought it was a DEI thing.
If the 20-something’s at DOGE proved anything last year, the keyword “black” associated with grant funding probably put the research on a list of DEI cuts.
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The real "partisan" question is, "What can the GOP leadership and their owners loot without immediate negative consequences for themselves?"