Comment by nikanj

I was raised in a working-class family in Greece in the 1980s. We lived in what the average US person would describe as "squalor". Cockroaches crawling on our faces style.

My parents made only a few luxury expenses: encyclopedias for us children, and especially books about space and the cosmos. So please speak for yourself when talking about the interests of struggling people.

Sure, and it's a huge indictment of our K-12 educational system. Investments in science, as a whole, pay off many, many, many times in returns. Same with universities and other knowledge-building institutions. If you want to raise everyone's standard of living, the most certain way is to increase investment in those things.

But alas, after many years of convincing people that going to college makes you dumber, enough people have started believing it that they willing vote against their own self-interest.

What a sleight of hand to suggest that science funding gathered from taxes is impacting the ability for poorer Americans to afford their food. No wonder politicization of science funding is so successful on the right: it’s so rhetorically intoxicating.

I agree. But that's what functioning government is supposed to be for. You don't build centuries long institutions by focusing on day to day concerns. Sure putting food on the table is important, but also a lot of that food comes from decades of research on agriculture and how to breed genetically diverse yet resilient crops.

Today's standards are yesterday's luxuries which were the day before's scientific breakthroughs.

And the idea that science is what's breaking the bank when it's barely a rounding error in the US budget is laughable. It's hard to get exact numbers for all R&D funding vs how much we spent on the Iran war but my estimates put just the single Iran war at anywhere from 20-50% and the goals for the Iran war are even more abstract and arguably make things much worse for average Americans on a day to day basis.

Well it’s not like the budget cuts to science are being redirected to those people. It’s going to the already rich.

Plenty of poor people across the world have scientific curiosity

That's a form of collective punishment that rewards their stigma. It would be like revoking tax breaks for farmers because you dislike rural American voters.

I spent nearly a decade disgusted with Trump but being contrarian by insisting that it was understandable why voters might support it, even if I felt they were wrong.

At this point, there’s no defending it. Anyone who supports this incarnation of the Republican Party is as stupid and backwards as they’ve been castigated.

Like this from the article:

> When Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDKD), first got to the NIH 12 years ago, she wanted to increase research into the social determinants of health—structural racism in home-loan practices meant that nonwhite people got iced out of home ownership and generational wealth, which forced them to live in neighborhoods closer to toxic sites such as factories and highways, without sidewalks and amenities. “It’s a challenging field to quantify, but we’re getting to a place in science where we can start asking these questions,” Norton says. Now the topic is verboten in U.S. grants. “That whole line of research has been shut off and censored because some people find the words ‘structural racism’ offensive.”

If you're a Republican, why should you want to fund people who dump on your view of the world with your taxes? Why do scientists feel free to talk this way about half the people who pay their salaries? It's just dumb to act politically and then get mad when people on the other side treat you as a political actor.

My last gig was at a startup that worked on SDoH issues for people on Medicaid and you know what we did when the administration changed? We started emphasizing values that would resonate with the new funders and dropped the SDoH framing. Still helping the same people, doing the same work, just talking about it in their language. It makes me think a lot of people aren't in this to do good science or help people who need it, but want their team to win more than they want good outcomes.

lol, are you implying science is dying because, you believe, less and less scientists are “conservative”. Do you have any notion of how ridiculous that sounds?

I’m not convinced academia purged itself, at least not in any way that they should be ashamed of. Reality has a liberal bias, and my extremely conservative uncle at one point mentioned how he didn’t want his kids to go to college, because college turns kids atheist. Actually, learning things opens your mind, and so the standard conservative positions come off looking pretty stupid after critical examination, so conservativism (i.e. dogmatism) and learning are inherently at odds. Falsifying or omitting things just to suit the feelings of conservatives is wrong, even if the alternative is to “purge them” from academia by making their stupidity unwelcome.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted. This is exactly the kind of expertise and competence we have in the Administration right now. It is totally believable that they would do a substring search for "black" and "trans" and defund black hole research and transistor science.

This is getting downvoted, but it's actually true. DOGE repeatedly used naive keyword searches to kill funding for projects that often had nothing to do with DEI.

> Among them was a $349,000 grant to replace an aging HVAC system at the High Point Museum in North Carolina. “Improving HVAC systems enhances preservation conditions for collections, aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences,” the ChatGPT DEI rationale stated.

> Another federal employee, whose primary job function is managing relations with private equity-held businesses, was placed on administrative leave "pursuant to the President's executive order on DEIA," per a dismissal memo reviewed by BI. https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-wrongly-flagged-jobs-pr...