Comment by Schlagbohrer
12 hours ago
My friends from grad school who went on to become professors tell me that not only did their grant funding dry up, but they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire, since the students came from foreign countries and faced new visa restrictions. So the money for science is gone, the people to do to the science are gone, and the institutions continue to not support their researchers, workers, and communities. It's the death of research in the usa.
Best friend had a masters in Biotech and same thing happened in the mid aughts. All of his funding dried up. He was told repeatedly to leave academia, its not worth it. He had a hard time leaving because he really did love the research they were doing. Said it was one of the hardest decisions he had to make.
He was lucky. He was able to make arrangements to go back to school to get his law degree. He then passed the bar and is now doing corporate law at a big firm in the Midwest.
Even now, several years later, he looks back and said he was smart to heed the warnings because its only gotten worse since the time he got out. He also had the ability to pivot into law, which not a lot of people would/could do.
I wonder what discoveries that could've helped people are now pushed back years if not decades.
Americans voted to bring the country back to the 1950's and the plan is working perfectly
The institutions and trust that generations of Americans carefully built has been gleefully torched by cruel incompetents in the space of a handful years. The damage, physical and social, is incalculable. The unpunished crimes, endless.
The reconstruction, if it happens at all, will take decades. It was all so unnecessary, so foolish.
The American Empire is gone and not coming back. It rose in a very different world and once these competitive advantages in science and elsewhere have been squandered they won't ever get back to the same level; there's too much competition from other countries now and too little faith that the US won't do this again.
As much as I hate it, we're heading into a more violent and less prosperous world. Whatever that morphs into long term almost certainly won't be as nice for Americans as the recent past was.
Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment.
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The soft power the US has lost will take a generation or more to rebuild if it's ever rebuilt.
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If we want to prevent this from happening people need to be able to trust their government and feel their interests are shared by their representatives.
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I honestly think the decline started sometime in the 80s when it was accepted that everything is solely about profits and nothing else. It took a while but the enshittification of the country is accelerating. The latest developments are in my view just a symptom of this much longer trend.
I for one welcome -the ̶̶̶̶̶screw ̶̶̶̶worm- our new AI overlords.
The retrogression perception is correct; but the specific timeframe is so incorrect that the back of my head blew out like a pinata.
The goal is - and I am not picking on the reactionary wing alone, this impulse has broad support across our ideologies - de-industrialization. The complexity of post-Enlightenment civilization is being rejected, in favor of some hypothetical state. This puts the past timeframe as far back as the 17th century.
But not a "real" past. No one can recreate the past. Only their idea of the past.
And of course, when you "create" anything, too much and too quickly, you risk systemic collapse. Not a problem if you imagine you will be Immortan Joeing around in your Death Wagon, but odds are, I'm sorry to say, against it.
The piñata bit is a bit hyperbolic, but largely I agree that it’s a movement built against the principles of the enlightenment, and the movements of modernism and post-modernism that grew out of it.
It’s like: what if we took all of the principles of the enlightenment, and forced them through a sieve that served our racist, xenophobic, chauvinist world view? Rediscovering eugenics and pseudoscience, especially for christofascist ambitions and exploitative grifting.
Trump is a populist doing populist things, including attacking the intellectuals.
Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years, which frankly was a pretty dumb "victory" to celebrate, because now they voted in a dumb gorilla that is just smashing things as revenge.
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The fifties are when a lot of this infrastructure got its start.
They want the 1850s.
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We funded research in the 1950s . This is more like the 30s.
The US in 1950s was very big on science. Nuclear, space, biology, etc, etc. Science seemed to have an answer to everything. I frankly don't remember a time when science was in such a low regard among the US public; maybe in the Deep South in 18th century.
Not really even that. The 1950s had a lot of problems in terms of racism and sexism, but wealth inequality was much lower than today with extremely high tax rates for the wealthy (under Eisenhower, a Republican!) And most relevant to this discussion, science and scientists were respected and well funded.
In the 1950s the US had lots of foreign scientists.
In fact if the US hadn't had its huge influx of foreign scientists fleeing the Nazis, who knows where we'd even be today.
Then there would be someone else who'd come. Considering they came to US and not to other places out of Europe. It would mean conditions were favorable in US.
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You're not wrong, but let's not forget that some large number of scientists (cough Werner von Braun cough) were fleeing prosecution as Nazis.
"And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now."
You could rewrite this the other way for the prior administration, simply replace the word "include" with preclude.
The institutions that built US science dominance were built in the 1950s. A fraction of Americans voted to bring America back to a cartoonish pastiche of images of the olden times (from 1950s, 1920s and 1800s) that they didn't know never existed and they didn't know that partly 'cause of education cuts starting in the 1970s-1980s.
I don't think this era of ignorance and anti-intellectualism can be compared to a previous point of time in modern America.
In the 50s taxation on wealthy individuals reached almost 90%.
And somehow they still managed to be very rich!
Things were considerably better in the '50s than whatever this is that we're living through. Especially for scientists. A lot less inequality too.
The only way in which we're "getting back to the 50s" is that it's now ok again to be openly racist and blatantly suppress the voting rights of black Americans.
Even the 1950s allowed for Operation Paperclip. This time is different.
Americans, broadly, didn't vote—those who did are obviously brainwashed cultists.
They don’t want the 1950s. We were pretty science forward then. The problem is they don’t really want to live in a world driven by facts because it eats into their privilege and they would rather have that.
Back to the 1930s.
People in the 1950s were convinced that the nuclear family was a disaster and the leading cause of divorce/poverty.
Huh? That seems counter to my perceptions. Any links to expound upon that?
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As a side-gig I taught within the doctoral education program for several high-ranking universities in Europe for about a decade (over a thousand PhD candidates). My impression is that nearly all funding for PhD projects flows to fields like medicine, physics, chemistry, computer science, electronics, and so on. Spending on humanities is absolutely minuscule compared to those.
I don't know, I did grad school in psychology and our grants would have been classified as "Medicine" or "Health" but a huge % of it is fundamentally ideological work rather than basic research. Academia really is a complicated mess, it's not an easy problem.
Then it should have been easy to cut only those grants instead of the "real science", right?
It's actually kind of a hard problem.
There are tens of thousands of grants. Some of them are classified as "medicine" and study things like hormones, some are classified as "computer science" or "mathematics" and study things like statistical bias. Which of these are the "real science" ones (e.g. HRT in older people with menopause or low-T) and which are the partisan-coded ones (e.g. gender HRT)?
Put aside whether or not you think the latter should be funded and suppose you're just trying to distinguish them to make sure the former continues to be. If you can't do it accurately then the current administration will do it anyway but with a machete instead of a scalpel. You'd need a large team of people who can tell the difference to go through them all and classify them. This is nominally the job of the thing referred to as the "deep state", but what do you do if you don't expect them to be non-partisan?
This is why strategies like "have partisans capture the administrators for our side" are a mistake.
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I'm curious why you think this would be an easy task. It strikes me as quite difficult! Separating scientific wheat from chaff requires a lot of effort and expertise.
As one famous example, Sokal intentionally made up funny bullshit and still fooled a ton of people!
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Research on weather and climate is now considered "woke". Anything can be labeled as partisan. Safer to stop funding all research, unless it can be shown to support what we already believe.
"R&D is a cost center" what an insightful take.
What a depressing view of the world.
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As a US citizen with a PhD, I didn't experience any clear discrimination in favor of foreign students during grad school.
I think the main reason so few US citizens get PhDs is because PhD "student" (they're actually workers) positions pay so poorly. Make PhD student positions have non-poverty wages and you'll see a lot more interest from US citizens.
On the flip side, I think foreign students experienced a lot of abusive conditions that I could more easily say no to because I didn't have a visa that required me to work at the university. I've seen some of that first hand. I don't mean to imply that there would be no cost to me saying no, just that I wouldn't have to leave the country if I said no.
I've seen clear discrimination in favor of foreign students, but it was specifically because of those abusive conditions. I know of professors who exclusively tried to recruit specific foreign nationalities (their own, typically) because they could get away with treating them worse than American students. I wouldn't have been able to get into those labs, but I also wouldn't want to.
im referring to the admissions process, and this discrimination has been present for decades
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When I was in grad school (2008-2011), of the 60 people in my program only 5 were American. The vast majority were Indian or Chinese (~50). I wouldn't say there was discrimination, though. The matriculation statistics were interest-based, mostly. A lot of the Americans who received their BS went immediately to industry.
During my engineering grad program I was fascinated by the gender disparity among americans (almost no women) versus the nearly equal gender balance among engineering grad students from India, the Middle East (including Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia), and China.
The engineering gender imbalance seems to be almost unique to the USA. Countries with awful records on women's rights sent just as many women to get PhDs as men.
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My understanding this is because being a grad student is hardly an economically good deal for a typical American student, but for the sort of foreigner who can afford to send their child to school in the US, it can still be valuable.
yeah most people are normal human beings, im saying the discrimination happens in getting admitted into the program
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Not really true but white Americans love to say that. Americans are the biggest bullies and and victims.
I know a ton of people who would love to get their Phd. When they can't make it work but see graduate programs heavily populated by foreign students (who may or may not stay) funded by (what they see as) their tax dollars, some become resentful. That's a pretty normal human reaction, not a uniquely white or American one. Understanding human realities and optics might have helped here. But instead you chose 'white people evil, Americans suck'. Not productive and in part how we got here with those positions now unfunded, and just as small minded as the attitudes you're condemning.
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