It’s true in the sense that scientific exploration expands our understanding of the world, which often forces us to re-evaluate our beliefs and adopt new ones, something that is antithetical to small C conservatism, almost by definition. So in that sense, reality does have a “liberal” (perhaps more accurately progressive) bias, the more we learn about it.
There is also quite a lot of history through the ages of science being a partisan issue as new discoveries upended the stories told by the established powers.
So I stand by my comment and it would apply to any political era.
Science is partisan, at least the 'science' being addressed in this article, because the funding for this science comes from a finite source and there are competing demands placed on this finite source. As any competent scientist knows, taking something from a finite source leaves less in the source. There are differing ideas and beliefs, some partisan (including those of the esteemed Mr. Colbert), on how best to divide up this finite source.
Science being partisan right now has nothing to do with funding. It has to do with the disdain that the people currently in power have to live in a shared reality with the rest of the poulation.
Theres a monumental leap from saying "lets not invest in climate change because thats not a good use of tax dollars" to "lets not invest in climate change because its a hoax."
Science is becoming partisan not just because of funding, but because too many people have stopped trying to persuade the people who need persuading. Instead we get statements like, "It has to do with the disdain that the people currently in power have to live in a shared reality with the rest of the population."
If your starting talking point is that half the country is irrational or detached from reality you've already abandoned the work of building consensus. We can keep doing the "Jon Stewart" thing and scoring points by calling the other side idiots, or we can grow up, act like adults, and do the much harder work of convincing people.
Any “investment” here directly translates to more human activity that will make climate change worse not better. It is hypocritical to have these climate conferences and fly there burning jet fuel.
The need of the hour is to drastically reduce the GDP - we need to rewind the clock 50years. But this will never happen because folks will lose jobs and scientists will lose their funding.
But specifically at this moment in time what you've written is total hogwash. Currently the US is spending money as if it's, specifically, an infinite resource.
Hence, this kaibosh on science funding can only be explained because the powers that be want it dead and gone.
Do with that info what you will. The various flavours of conspiracy-theory-leaning ideas on wanting to 'scare the scientist community away from commenting on political affairs' seem like the most likely explanation to me despite how petty and crazy that sounds.
If you are a scientist, get out.
Either out of science, or away from US-centric research systems.
Currently, in the US, money is an infinite resource. One need only look at the world's latest one point five trillionaire.
Where is the money coming from to support that valuation? And why is it being spent to maintain that valuation?
Part of it is accounting tricks (sell 5% of a company for $20, and you're worth $400 with only $20 changing hands) but there's also genuinely a massive unexplained amount of money in existence in the US financial system, that should have caused massive inflation by now but somehow hasn't. Maybe it's only a matter of time, or maybe due to class segregation, it's stable like this and will never come down the ladder to affect grocery prices?
> there are competing demands placed on this finite source
The US national debt has gone up by 2 trillion under the current administration. They are spending money they don't have at a faster rate than any time in history.
Whatever else you can say about the cuts to science, you can't say they're due to "competing demands." They're not cutting in order to fund better research, they're cutting (in the most counterproductive way) to send a message to scientists that politically inconvenient research is not welcome.
Trump's 17 months in office saw $17T increase in debt, 30% of the entire US debt, representing about 220 years of what had accumulated prior to ever electing him.
Certainly most universities now have a very strong liberal bias. I think most science departments were left leaning in the 1950s, but it is stronger now. (I think colleges and universities have always been more progressive than the general populous.) The administrations of universities are now very strongly Democrat leaning. I think that Trump just sees a lot of Democrat run institutions and thinks, "Why should the government support these institutions run almost entirely by Democrats."
Because until this administration, it has been considered a vital principle of democracy that the elected government supports all the citizens and institutions of the nation, not just the ones that it controls.
But principles don't exist out of nowhere. We had a very partisan country in the past. Consensus was built to get us here, then we just stopped putting in work on building/keeping consensus and resorted to Jon Stewart style calling/making people look like idiots, and expecting past consensus to hold things together in a Jon Stewart style world of mockery of each other. Consensus requires respect each way. One side threw it out the door (knowing or not) with Jon Stewart style ridicule of other but is shocked when that then got responded to X100 with Trump style politics.
Exactly man exactly, most every professor in the United States hates Donald Trump. 80, 90, 95%+ of professors at about say, 90% of all universities hates Donald Trump and the Republican party and will gladly tell you they do. The thing is, this isn't a new thing, they also hated the last R guy, and the R guy before him, and so on and so forth. What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him? To be fair, that's what he usually does though, so I can understand being blindsided by this.
> What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him?
So you believe it's expected that a president will de-fund everything that supports their opposing party? I'm sure that's a totally great idea that won't cause any issues whatsoever.
> What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him?
Never before in my recollection has U.S. national science policy been tied so closely tied to personal fealty to the president. It is alarming that you see nothing wrong with the connecting science funding to political alignment. This is highly aberrant.
In any case, if a majority of academics despise Trump and lean leftward overall, then maybe it would be a moment for self-identifying Republicans to gaze into the mirror and see what might be the reasons for this. As an academic, I have a commitment to the truth. This administration has no such commitment. This has been thoroughly documented.
This is has been significantly overstated my entire life - people making this claim always point to the women’s studies faculty and don’t mention how many engineering, Econ, law, etc. faculty are more conservative — but it more deeply misses the cause, as well. As the Republican Party purged internal dissent, that pushed people out who might have otherwise been on board for things like their fiscal or foreign policy positions but weren’t willing to say gay people were less than fully human or rejected the war on science. That last one is huge for universities because for most of the current century being a Republican has required rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change, the most pressing issue of our time, as well as other topics like public health or the separation of church and state. Criticizing universities for not having more people who reject their foundational principles is badly missing the point.
I used to know a Republican lobbyist who worked on environmental issues. He used to represent the coalition of fishers, hunters, hikers, bird-watchers, etc. who valued healthy forests, water, etc. but that line of work disappeared when they put out the fatwa against giving Obama any legislative wins even on issues which have broad public support and it never really came back because the party leadership decide that they represented industry first and only. Those people didn’t suddenly become liberals, the party moved away from them.
Me neither. Lots of them deny that certain differences between humanity exist however, and that's just biology.
Eg. Fe-/male and racial differences. They exist, yet they cannot be admitted to and any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot, because the other terms are already less impactful from overuse
Please don't do this* here.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It’s true in the sense that scientific exploration expands our understanding of the world, which often forces us to re-evaluate our beliefs and adopt new ones, something that is antithetical to small C conservatism, almost by definition. So in that sense, reality does have a “liberal” (perhaps more accurately progressive) bias, the more we learn about it.
There is also quite a lot of history through the ages of science being a partisan issue as new discoveries upended the stories told by the established powers.
So I stand by my comment and it would apply to any political era.
There’s a reason Colbert’s joke works: it’s true.
Ok, but that doesn't make the GP a good Hacker News comment. It simply repeats a cliché, and a good HN comment should be more substantive than that.
Science is partisan, at least the 'science' being addressed in this article, because the funding for this science comes from a finite source and there are competing demands placed on this finite source. As any competent scientist knows, taking something from a finite source leaves less in the source. There are differing ideas and beliefs, some partisan (including those of the esteemed Mr. Colbert), on how best to divide up this finite source.
Science being partisan right now has nothing to do with funding. It has to do with the disdain that the people currently in power have to live in a shared reality with the rest of the poulation.
Theres a monumental leap from saying "lets not invest in climate change because thats not a good use of tax dollars" to "lets not invest in climate change because its a hoax."
Science is becoming partisan not just because of funding, but because too many people have stopped trying to persuade the people who need persuading. Instead we get statements like, "It has to do with the disdain that the people currently in power have to live in a shared reality with the rest of the population."
If your starting talking point is that half the country is irrational or detached from reality you've already abandoned the work of building consensus. We can keep doing the "Jon Stewart" thing and scoring points by calling the other side idiots, or we can grow up, act like adults, and do the much harder work of convincing people.
2 replies →
Any “investment” here directly translates to more human activity that will make climate change worse not better. It is hypocritical to have these climate conferences and fly there burning jet fuel. The need of the hour is to drastically reduce the GDP - we need to rewind the clock 50years. But this will never happen because folks will lose jobs and scientists will lose their funding.
1 reply →
Exactly. One side prefers being miserly on science while spending lavishly on needless wars.
In normal times, what you say is obviously true.
But specifically at this moment in time what you've written is total hogwash. Currently the US is spending money as if it's, specifically, an infinite resource.
Hence, this kaibosh on science funding can only be explained because the powers that be want it dead and gone.
Do with that info what you will. The various flavours of conspiracy-theory-leaning ideas on wanting to 'scare the scientist community away from commenting on political affairs' seem like the most likely explanation to me despite how petty and crazy that sounds.
If you are a scientist, get out.
Either out of science, or away from US-centric research systems.
Currently, in the US, money is an infinite resource. One need only look at the world's latest one point five trillionaire.
Where is the money coming from to support that valuation? And why is it being spent to maintain that valuation?
Part of it is accounting tricks (sell 5% of a company for $20, and you're worth $400 with only $20 changing hands) but there's also genuinely a massive unexplained amount of money in existence in the US financial system, that should have caused massive inflation by now but somehow hasn't. Maybe it's only a matter of time, or maybe due to class segregation, it's stable like this and will never come down the ladder to affect grocery prices?
6 replies →
> there are competing demands placed on this finite source
The US national debt has gone up by 2 trillion under the current administration. They are spending money they don't have at a faster rate than any time in history.
Whatever else you can say about the cuts to science, you can't say they're due to "competing demands." They're not cutting in order to fund better research, they're cutting (in the most counterproductive way) to send a message to scientists that politically inconvenient research is not welcome.
Trump's 17 months in office saw $17T increase in debt, 30% of the entire US debt, representing about 220 years of what had accumulated prior to ever electing him.
1 reply →
Certainly most universities now have a very strong liberal bias. I think most science departments were left leaning in the 1950s, but it is stronger now. (I think colleges and universities have always been more progressive than the general populous.) The administrations of universities are now very strongly Democrat leaning. I think that Trump just sees a lot of Democrat run institutions and thinks, "Why should the government support these institutions run almost entirely by Democrats."
Because until this administration, it has been considered a vital principle of democracy that the elected government supports all the citizens and institutions of the nation, not just the ones that it controls.
But principles don't exist out of nowhere. We had a very partisan country in the past. Consensus was built to get us here, then we just stopped putting in work on building/keeping consensus and resorted to Jon Stewart style calling/making people look like idiots, and expecting past consensus to hold things together in a Jon Stewart style world of mockery of each other. Consensus requires respect each way. One side threw it out the door (knowing or not) with Jon Stewart style ridicule of other but is shocked when that then got responded to X100 with Trump style politics.
Exactly man exactly, most every professor in the United States hates Donald Trump. 80, 90, 95%+ of professors at about say, 90% of all universities hates Donald Trump and the Republican party and will gladly tell you they do. The thing is, this isn't a new thing, they also hated the last R guy, and the R guy before him, and so on and so forth. What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him? To be fair, that's what he usually does though, so I can understand being blindsided by this.
> What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him?
So you believe it's expected that a president will de-fund everything that supports their opposing party? I'm sure that's a totally great idea that won't cause any issues whatsoever.
American politics are so absurd.
3 replies →
> What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him?
Never before in my recollection has U.S. national science policy been tied so closely tied to personal fealty to the president. It is alarming that you see nothing wrong with the connecting science funding to political alignment. This is highly aberrant.
In any case, if a majority of academics despise Trump and lean leftward overall, then maybe it would be a moment for self-identifying Republicans to gaze into the mirror and see what might be the reasons for this. As an academic, I have a commitment to the truth. This administration has no such commitment. This has been thoroughly documented.
1 reply →
This is has been significantly overstated my entire life - people making this claim always point to the women’s studies faculty and don’t mention how many engineering, Econ, law, etc. faculty are more conservative — but it more deeply misses the cause, as well. As the Republican Party purged internal dissent, that pushed people out who might have otherwise been on board for things like their fiscal or foreign policy positions but weren’t willing to say gay people were less than fully human or rejected the war on science. That last one is huge for universities because for most of the current century being a Republican has required rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change, the most pressing issue of our time, as well as other topics like public health or the separation of church and state. Criticizing universities for not having more people who reject their foundational principles is badly missing the point.
I used to know a Republican lobbyist who worked on environmental issues. He used to represent the coalition of fishers, hunters, hikers, bird-watchers, etc. who valued healthy forests, water, etc. but that line of work disappeared when they put out the fatwa against giving Obama any legislative wins even on issues which have broad public support and it never really came back because the party leadership decide that they represented industry first and only. Those people didn’t suddenly become liberals, the party moved away from them.
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I don't think I've ever met a leftist denying evolution.
Me neither. Lots of them deny that certain differences between humanity exist however, and that's just biology.
Eg. Fe-/male and racial differences. They exist, yet they cannot be admitted to and any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot, because the other terms are already less impactful from overuse
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Totally, but there’s a lot more to science than just evolution.
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