This is a great post but Musk doesn't read the column.
Now, some follow up.
I think you are imputing too much faith in the Anti DEI justification for torching federal research.
Republicans and corporate aligned people have been hostile to basic science since it was white men in white coats saying, "Actually, nicotine is addictive and smoking kills". Anthropogenic climate change has been widely scientifically accepted since the 1980s and well funded efforts to deny/discredit the science have been around since then too. It goes even older than that with religious authorities, mostly on the right trying to discredit research saying that people evolved or the earth is billions of years old.
Reagan didn't pull Carter's solar panels off the white house because of DEi programs in 2005.
The "Why did those awful DEI people make the Right do this" tone of the piece is thus a bit overblown.
It was a useful bit of overreach that provided the Right an opening to enact an agenda that has been going on for decades.
As you do read Scott Alexander and are probably familiar with Elizier Yudkowsky, I wanted to leave a quote which I think is more reflective of Trump/Musk's actual purpose. (Though some left people have this pathology as well)
"Lies propagate, that's what I'm saying. You've got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that's connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you'd even have to start lying about the general laws of thought.
Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn't work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn't work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they've got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn't exist and there's no such thing as objective reality.
A lot of common wisdom like that isn't just mistaken, it's anti-epistemology, it's systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there's someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there's a lot of people out there telling lies."
There's a simpler explanation: the GOP is now vehemently anti-science because they must be so to appease two key constituencies; the Fossil Fuel industry and the Religious Right.
Decades of GOP vitriol against science on behalf of these two stakeholders has been mirrored by RW media coverage during the same period, and was directly responsible for the RW anti-vaccine hysteria during the pandemic; and now the elevation of a notorious anti-vaxxer to a key Executive Branch cabinet position.
Add to this straightforward political explanation, the cherry-on-top: tax offsets for the GOP's 2025 "Leave No Billionaire Behind" omnibus bill that will add a further $2.5 trillion to the national debt, and that will deliver 60% of all tax cuts to the richest 5% of Americans.
Anti-vaccine madness is not a religious right bugaboo, it started with natural-is-best hippies and was mostly found in progressive neighborhoods in California and other blue states, but then capitalized by RFKjr ( an anti progress lefty whose greatest achievement before making a deal with Trump was closing the Indian Point nuclear power plant in NY to “save the river”. His current focus is suing vaccine makers with his Children’s Health Defense non-profit, which will collect bigger settlements if he goes through with threats to remove immunity from vaccine producers.
Trump will do more damage to science by the likes of RFKjr and Mehmet Oz being in charge of health than by cutting NSF budgets.
The anti Vax shift to the right happened over the past decade. It's like how Democrats went from the pro slavery party in 1860 to winning 90% of black people in 1980.
The shift of anti vaxx from hippies to conservatives is an interesting phenomenon, but it doesn't change that the current anti vaxx movement is very much a conservative hobby horse.
Anti-vaxx went from being VERY fringe Left; to something that now DOMINATES the Right. Something else we have to thank our friends at FOX News and RW media. Who now have 50% of the country living in an anti-science, alternative facts fantasyland. All so that the GOP can win elections. And then to give tax cuts to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
If this current round of GOP budgetary madness continues, the GOP stands to add another $10 trillion to the debt. Just so Jeffy can buy a few more yachts.
Contra other poster's claims about corporate and religious lobbying, I think this is a somewhat fundamental part of small-c conservatism where learning that something you've always done (or at least accepted as normal) has some downsides becomes seen as a personal attack on your identity and people become reactionary and defensive about it.
Because the same thing happens in countries without fossil fuel lobbies. It happens if you e.g. go to Vietnam and tell people that putting sugar into their smoothies and fruit juices (because the fruit isn't sweet enough on its own!) might be contributing to soaring diabetes rates. Or that a diet of white rice might not be so great when you've been diagnosed with gestational diabetes.
Humans have a very strong "this is how we've always done it and I'll tolerate no implication there's anything wrong with that" default. (Even when "always done it" really just means "since my childhood" and not, like, centuries.)
A lot of people want to get through life never having to reevaluate anything. They want to focus on their families and hobbies and not have to adopt some kind of lifelong learners mindset and continually second guess every decision they make on everything.
This article is about basic scientific research spending, which has nothing to do with anthropogenic climate change, unless you mean geoengineering to address the effects of it. The NSF last year funded research in these areas:
1. Artificial Intelligence (NAIRR pilot, AI Research Institutes)
2. Quantum Information Science (National Quantum Nanofab, research projects)
3. Biotechnology (sustainable polymers, bioeconomy Global Centers)
4. Advanced Computing
5. Next-Generation Wireless Networking
6. Sustainable Polymers
7. Bioeconomy Challenges
8. STEM Education and Workforce Development (eclipse outreach, training programs)
9. Regional Innovation Ecosystems (support for emerging institutions)
10. Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure (e.g., quantum nanofab facility)
No climate change focus, unless you count sustainable polymers.
I agree with Matthew that this is much deeper than DEI, which could be eliminated without gutting the entire enterprise. Authoritarians need to break any source of legitimacy other than their word and science does that in spades. You also left out that once the scientific edifice is broken, it would take decades if ever to build it back. I used to work at Bell Labs and I have worked for decades within the academic biomedical field. Every research field has many sub specialists not just in the knowledge but the skills in making things work. Once that is gone, it is gone.
I have nothing remotely approaching your expertise, but I do wonder how much potential human productivity has been lost because of discrimination against women and minorities over decades, centuries, and millennia. Sure, plenty of white guys have produced extraordinary things; but I think the left wing argument that a lot of white male over-achievement is due to deeply embedded institutional favoritism is hard to dismiss out of hand.
It’s hardly perfect, but the “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” essay does stick with me.
All good points... However, I do think it is reasonable to review/update science funding policy.
1) Overhead Rate: There is a purely budgetary reason to go after this rate. Most R1 universities have negotiated a very large percentage (over 50%) overhead rate. The rationale for this is to pay for the investments in infrastructure which the university bears. However, one cannot help and feel that there might be abuse underneath. It is hard to believe that computer science research is treated the same as medical research. We need a better mechanism to evaluate this overhead rate.
2) Type of Research: Federal research is best done when it is basic research and best done when it is curiosity-based research. However, like all bureaucracies with CYA behavior, there is a tendency to fund reduced risk (the opposite of what should be done). Also, there is builtin bias based on a small set of elite institutions (not necessarily bad).
3) Access: Currently, beyond SBIR grants, private industry is shut out from most grants... this really makes no sense.
4) Administration: The regulatory state and cost (part of the reason for the overhead rate) is high..reforming the nature of this regulatory overhead is goodness.
Overall, the system can be improved significantly... now is it the biggest problem in the world...likely not... healthcare, traditional education, and other issues are quite a bit more important to attack first.
I feel like a lot of Republican critiques on America and woke ism have some validity - as do leftist and liberal critiques of many of our institutions. The problem is, Trump is using that as an opening to control everything, by greatly lessening American strength. Hes throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and not to reform but to control.
Yes, sure, these might all be valid points, but do you believe that is what they are actually trying to achieve? And that this is a good way to do that?
A part of the “genius” of Trump is that he says so many different and vague things that everyone is able to project their own issues into him and find explanations that make his behaviour reasonable, justifiable and perhaps even desirable. But Trump is not in fact doing what we hope he is doing, and it is this projective sanewashing that keeps us blind to the dangers and consequences of his actions.
"I don't know why you guys in the physics department keep demanding all this expensive equipment. All the mathematics department asks for is paper, pencils, and wastebaskets, and the philosophy department doesn't even ask for wastebaskets!"
Consider the use of 'have become' in the following Noah quote from above: "Racially discriminatory hiring practices are hard to measure, but they appear to have become fairly commonplace in the sciences." The implication is that hiring practices were once race neutral but are now, thanks to DEI, racially discriminatory. I would argue that hiring practices were once quietly and implicitly discriminatory in favor of one particular racial & gender set, and have now become loudly and explicitly in favor of a different racial & gender set.
So was the quote by the NIH researcher shown in the article saying “we for sure don’t want to hire white men”, is that the old quiet and implicit discrimination or the new loud and explicit kind?
There is a significantly longer list of US Government funded R&D achievements. It is also important that the greatest US Research achievements came primarily at Corporate Research Centers. Like Sarnoff/RCA, Bell Labs/ATT, GE Schenectady, IBM. Some of course at many Universities. Almost none at startups.
Arguably, Jobs and Wozniak succeeded because Personal computer development never needed any big facility. In fact, their success was totally derivative from Bell Labs/ Transister, Fairchild/Semiconductor, and Hewlett Packard.
US federal R&D - created
Optics and optical products
Itek - 1st Satellite reconnaissance photography.
Led to Hughes funded develop Semiconductor optical lithography.
Which enabled Semiconductors for memory, multi transistor integrated circuits
Fiber optics and laser development at Bell Labs secretly allowed their use as deep sea submarine sensors. Small Weight distorts the optical signal.
Someone had a great overview of just Bell Labs contributions.
Looking at NSF funded research in 2024 it is primarily AI, advanced computing, quantum computing and advanced wireless networking, semiconductors and sustainable polymers. But it also spent money on promoting schools to observe solar eclipses, which is not basic research nor well spent money. And all of the breakthroughs in AI, semiconductors and quantum computers were from Microsoft, Alphabet, NVidia, Apple and other private companies. I can’t recall one from national laboratories or other research institutions.
> For this reason, I hope Trump’s purge fails, but I also hope that the scientific establishment responds to the purge by simply ditching the politicized crap of 2020-2024 and returning to a stance of political neutrality.
So you want the purge to fail, but the leftist crap to be gone? For science to go back to being science the purge has to succeed. For the patient to live, the cancer has to be destroyed. You can't have it both ways. This sounds similar to your position on the Democratic party. You want everyone to just forget what happened and go back to being a reasonable social democratic party, but still consisting of all the same people who have forced their extremist ideology onto everything they have touched. How can you possibly believe either of these things is going to happen?
Great post. The impact of science is so direct as the fact that the pandemic was much shorter, leading to a less pronounced fall in GDP. In regards to FElon, one would think that the great engineer would appreciate science, but apparently he has too narrow of a vision and believes in some kind of computer powered Darwinism.
The only pandemic research that was significant was Project Warp Speed created by Trump 1.0 which made the vaccines available way ahead of schedule in 9 months when Fauci said it would take 18 months. Project DeFuse funded in 2018 for gain of function research at Wuhan Institute of Virology and the subsequent coverup of this data by the Proximal Origins paper by Fauci and Collins likely contributed to the actual pandemic happening, but those felons are now protected by blanket preemptive pardons, so will not be investigated or prosecuted.
Some will find it offensive, but demanding DEI fealty statements from those involved in the sciences is antithetical. Those were attempts to gain political power by controlling people's behavior and thinking. In so doing, the DEI programs distract from the actual discipline necessary to accomplish progress in the fields of science. The sciences must remain neutral with regard to political perspective. Taking the knee in fealty can lead to very poor outcomes. Just look at the US Senate. Where have honor, integrity and leadership gone? Trump's attack on DEI programs has little to do with re-establishing balance and is merely a political lever he pulls in order to usurp control over society. Trump lives and breathes the Marxist/Postmodernist messages from the authoritarian playbook. For Trump, this is all about personal power and control. It has nothing to do with the efficiency, functioning and advancement of society. "The People" is an authoritarian lever he pulls. He could not care less about the citizens of the United States.
The "hard sciences" threaten the Humpty Dumpty narrative - when I use a word it means what I want it to mean. The lab is the school of hard knocks. Hypothesis - cell growth will increase if I increase pH of culture medium. Go into the lab - whoops I'm wrong. Not just I might be wrong, just wrong. So scientists learn that "the truth is out there".
This is very distinct from pundit land where NASDAQ goes up and explanation is NVIDIA reported strong earnings but if the market goes down NVIDIA news was already priced into the market! The same facts justify opposite conclusions. No one learns a fundamental truth in this punditry (Of course, this is job security for anyone opining on the economy - we'll never know with high certainty. Happily for Noah this means he'll be able to write economic commentary for decades as we try to figure out what combination of factors results in great economic results).
Needless to say a reality orientation is deeply threatening to the big lie. Although there has been recent discussion about falsification of research this is a very tiny part of the entire research enterprise. Scientific progress is largely tied to doing good experimental work, publicizing that work and being recognized (grants) to build on the work. The drive to publish distinguishes academic research from private research where confidential information is perceived as a competitive advantage.
There is a time value to knowledge! Putting information quickly into the public domain (even if patented) starts the economically impactful development process. Academics prioritize publicity, private companies confidentiality.
Finally ROI focuses private research on short term payoff. As an example the microbiome work goes back decades to cockroaches and other creatures. As Noah noted great tabloid headline - researcher studies cockroach disease! But these studies led into the ongoing work on the human microbiome which (in a decade or two) is likely to result in medical interventions that improve human health.
So let me close with Noah's words - "An experiment I would prefer not to conduct" and let me rephrase" "Don't fucking do it". In a probabilistic sense russian roulette with all chambers loaded.
In the course of my career in the biopharma industry, I have been fortunate enough to take part in some meetings on this topic. There is a nexus between industry funded research and the basic science funded by USDA, NIH, NSF, and even DOD (would we have the Internet without DOD funding; probably but it might have arrived later than it did). A very useful symposium was held by the University of Pennsylvania back in December 1982. The proceedings published as "Partners in the Research Enterprise: University-Corporate Relations in Science and Technology" is a valid today as it was over forty years ago (alas, the University of Pennsylvania Press only has a very expensive volume in print). In particular, the paper by then Genentech general counsel, Thomas Kiley, had a nice presentation on licensing revenues and showed how the return on Federal research investment is magnified by the development of new technologies and industries. Afterall, these companies and their employees pay taxes back to the US government.
I'll leave aside the discussion of DEI other than to note one thing. I'm involved with the NIH through a non-profit where I am Board Chair. One of the interesting things about NIH is that back in the 1950s when most universities had anti-nepotism regulations, the NIH hired a number of husband and wife medical scientists as well women to full time positions in the intramural program located in Bethesda. Many of these women had outstanding research careers and were honored by election to the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. Most of the younger generation does not realize how opportunities to pursue scientific careers were limited in this period.
The husband wife co-hiring was probably to limit rejections because of the spouse for jobs which required moving, not as a way to include more women. Even now of such a policy if done in a gender neutral way, probably wouldn’t be considered DEI unless you argued it discriminated against unmarried scientists.
If you want the smartest most capable researchers, then putting weight on their ethnic or sexual diversity means you are bound to hire some who are less capable. You could argue that capability isn’t the most important factor, but is there any evidence that diversity alone is a benefit? If you had a team of all Asian women compared to a group of researchers of mixed races and sexes, would you expect both groups to get equivalent results if they didn’t control for capability?
You have it backwards. If the system is only putting an ethically defined group of people in positions of power and influence, then you are missing out on the capabilities of the rest of the nation.
Just over a month into the Trump administration, he has politicized military leadership, closed national parks, betrayed freedom abroad, and is actively working to make the economy worse in the short term and long term. And all of this in an effort to break our constitution and take as much power as the compliant courts and congress let him.
He will lose power at some point - most likely because he's an old man. And when he does it will likely be continued chaos. And hopefully 5-10 years after that we have re-industrialized, re-armed, and re-freedomed. And maybe we can go camping again.
on your latest Econ 102 podcast: I'm no fan of Tim Walz but I think it's kind of disappointing that you didn't do your homework on that whole "misinformation" clip of his. If you actually watch the full interview and not the propaganda clip, he is explicitly referring to spreading lies about election dates or locations, which *is* illegal in the U.S.
Walz was not advocating for any additional restrictions on the first amendment.
You think this is worse than the stuff Elon and Trump say? Really?
There is no first amendment exception for election disinformation, although some states (not the federal government) have laws about spreading false information about voting sites, but must be narrowly tailored to pass constitutional muster.
And though he tries to spin that he’s talking about polling places at the end, he clearly says he thinks that hate speech and misinformation are not allowed by the first amendment when multiple Supreme Court rulings have said the opposite: hate speech and misinformation are protected speech, or did you never hear of Skokie, Illinois?
Here’s the full exchange:
[MARIA TERESA KUMAR, MNSBC HOST]: … I want to talk about what you just mentioned about misinformation, because, oftentimes before, in previous political chapters, disinformation, telling people were to vote the wrong way, that was kind of -- these were called -- considered shenanigans.
But it's becoming more ominous. Can you talk a little bit about that…
WALZ: Oh, yes.
KUMAR: … and what you will do to ensure that there are penalties for that?
WALZ: Yes.
Years ago, it was the little things, telling people to vote the day after the election. And we kind of brushed them off. Now we know it's intimidation at the ballot box. It's undermining the idea that mail-in ballots aren't legal.
I think we need to push back on this. There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy. Tell the truth, where the voting places are, who can vote, who's able to be there….
The entire transcript from top to bottom is talking about misinformation regarding voting place/mail-in ballot disinformation and intimidation regarding voting rights. Walz mentions "hate speech" exactly once in the concluding sentence. I would not agree with your claim that "he [only] tries to spin that he’s talking about polling places at the end."
Maybe there's more to the transcript than you posted. If so, you should have posted that.
I have a silly theory that one of America's inner strengths is the belief that we are always the underdog... and that the Republican party so wants to believe this that they are willing to actually make us the underdog by tripping us up. Then, in 10 to 25 years, as the ramifications of these decisions show up, the USA will actually be the underdog. Morally, the world is a lot easier to navigate when you are the underdog, and you can get your citizens on the same page as you are trying to dig out of a hole (even if you also dug it yourself). It is a lot harder to be a fat, rich nation trying to make good decisions...
Maybe conservatives don't trust academic institutions because those institutions have spent 50 years proliferating Leftist garbage like postmodernism, intersectionality, decolonization, and grievance studies.
Put the shoe on the other foot for a moment, progressives. Imagine if you had spent 50 years watching Christians gradually convert every academic and research institution into a mouthpiece for Christian dogma. And then you suddenly got control of the purse strings. Would you let it all continue while you went through and carefully cut only those things that were the most extreme? Or would you stop everything while you did that review? Be honest.
This is a great post but Musk doesn't read the column.
Now, some follow up.
I think you are imputing too much faith in the Anti DEI justification for torching federal research.
Republicans and corporate aligned people have been hostile to basic science since it was white men in white coats saying, "Actually, nicotine is addictive and smoking kills". Anthropogenic climate change has been widely scientifically accepted since the 1980s and well funded efforts to deny/discredit the science have been around since then too. It goes even older than that with religious authorities, mostly on the right trying to discredit research saying that people evolved or the earth is billions of years old.
Reagan didn't pull Carter's solar panels off the white house because of DEi programs in 2005.
The "Why did those awful DEI people make the Right do this" tone of the piece is thus a bit overblown.
It was a useful bit of overreach that provided the Right an opening to enact an agenda that has been going on for decades.
As you do read Scott Alexander and are probably familiar with Elizier Yudkowsky, I wanted to leave a quote which I think is more reflective of Trump/Musk's actual purpose. (Though some left people have this pathology as well)
"Lies propagate, that's what I'm saying. You've got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that's connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you'd even have to start lying about the general laws of thought.
Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn't work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn't work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they've got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn't exist and there's no such thing as objective reality.
A lot of common wisdom like that isn't just mistaken, it's anti-epistemology, it's systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there's someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there's a lot of people out there telling lies."
There's a simpler explanation: the GOP is now vehemently anti-science because they must be so to appease two key constituencies; the Fossil Fuel industry and the Religious Right.
Decades of GOP vitriol against science on behalf of these two stakeholders has been mirrored by RW media coverage during the same period, and was directly responsible for the RW anti-vaccine hysteria during the pandemic; and now the elevation of a notorious anti-vaxxer to a key Executive Branch cabinet position.
Add to this straightforward political explanation, the cherry-on-top: tax offsets for the GOP's 2025 "Leave No Billionaire Behind" omnibus bill that will add a further $2.5 trillion to the national debt, and that will deliver 60% of all tax cuts to the richest 5% of Americans.
Anti-vaccine madness is not a religious right bugaboo, it started with natural-is-best hippies and was mostly found in progressive neighborhoods in California and other blue states, but then capitalized by RFKjr ( an anti progress lefty whose greatest achievement before making a deal with Trump was closing the Indian Point nuclear power plant in NY to “save the river”. His current focus is suing vaccine makers with his Children’s Health Defense non-profit, which will collect bigger settlements if he goes through with threats to remove immunity from vaccine producers.
Trump will do more damage to science by the likes of RFKjr and Mehmet Oz being in charge of health than by cutting NSF budgets.
The anti Vax shift to the right happened over the past decade. It's like how Democrats went from the pro slavery party in 1860 to winning 90% of black people in 1980.
The shift of anti vaxx from hippies to conservatives is an interesting phenomenon, but it doesn't change that the current anti vaxx movement is very much a conservative hobby horse.
This.
Anti-vaxx went from being VERY fringe Left; to something that now DOMINATES the Right. Something else we have to thank our friends at FOX News and RW media. Who now have 50% of the country living in an anti-science, alternative facts fantasyland. All so that the GOP can win elections. And then to give tax cuts to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
If this current round of GOP budgetary madness continues, the GOP stands to add another $10 trillion to the debt. Just so Jeffy can buy a few more yachts.
Contra other poster's claims about corporate and religious lobbying, I think this is a somewhat fundamental part of small-c conservatism where learning that something you've always done (or at least accepted as normal) has some downsides becomes seen as a personal attack on your identity and people become reactionary and defensive about it.
Because the same thing happens in countries without fossil fuel lobbies. It happens if you e.g. go to Vietnam and tell people that putting sugar into their smoothies and fruit juices (because the fruit isn't sweet enough on its own!) might be contributing to soaring diabetes rates. Or that a diet of white rice might not be so great when you've been diagnosed with gestational diabetes.
Humans have a very strong "this is how we've always done it and I'll tolerate no implication there's anything wrong with that" default. (Even when "always done it" really just means "since my childhood" and not, like, centuries.)
A lot of people want to get through life never having to reevaluate anything. They want to focus on their families and hobbies and not have to adopt some kind of lifelong learners mindset and continually second guess every decision they make on everything.
And before it was tobacco, it was leaded gasoline.
https://www.space.com/25579-cosmos-recap-earth-age-lead-poisoning.html
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/chris-mooney/the-republican-war-on-science/9780465003860/?lens=basic-books
This article is about basic scientific research spending, which has nothing to do with anthropogenic climate change, unless you mean geoengineering to address the effects of it. The NSF last year funded research in these areas:
1. Artificial Intelligence (NAIRR pilot, AI Research Institutes)
2. Quantum Information Science (National Quantum Nanofab, research projects)
3. Biotechnology (sustainable polymers, bioeconomy Global Centers)
4. Advanced Computing
5. Next-Generation Wireless Networking
6. Sustainable Polymers
7. Bioeconomy Challenges
8. STEM Education and Workforce Development (eclipse outreach, training programs)
9. Regional Innovation Ecosystems (support for emerging institutions)
10. Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure (e.g., quantum nanofab facility)
No climate change focus, unless you count sustainable polymers.
I agree with Matthew that this is much deeper than DEI, which could be eliminated without gutting the entire enterprise. Authoritarians need to break any source of legitimacy other than their word and science does that in spades. You also left out that once the scientific edifice is broken, it would take decades if ever to build it back. I used to work at Bell Labs and I have worked for decades within the academic biomedical field. Every research field has many sub specialists not just in the knowledge but the skills in making things work. Once that is gone, it is gone.
I have nothing remotely approaching your expertise, but I do wonder how much potential human productivity has been lost because of discrimination against women and minorities over decades, centuries, and millennia. Sure, plenty of white guys have produced extraordinary things; but I think the left wing argument that a lot of white male over-achievement is due to deeply embedded institutional favoritism is hard to dismiss out of hand.
It’s hardly perfect, but the “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” essay does stick with me.
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/why-have-there-been-no-great-women-artists-4201/
Outreach / recruitment is good /appropriate/ necessary. But it’s a separate issue than gutting the whole thing, which is what is happening.
All good points... However, I do think it is reasonable to review/update science funding policy.
1) Overhead Rate: There is a purely budgetary reason to go after this rate. Most R1 universities have negotiated a very large percentage (over 50%) overhead rate. The rationale for this is to pay for the investments in infrastructure which the university bears. However, one cannot help and feel that there might be abuse underneath. It is hard to believe that computer science research is treated the same as medical research. We need a better mechanism to evaluate this overhead rate.
2) Type of Research: Federal research is best done when it is basic research and best done when it is curiosity-based research. However, like all bureaucracies with CYA behavior, there is a tendency to fund reduced risk (the opposite of what should be done). Also, there is builtin bias based on a small set of elite institutions (not necessarily bad).
3) Access: Currently, beyond SBIR grants, private industry is shut out from most grants... this really makes no sense.
4) Administration: The regulatory state and cost (part of the reason for the overhead rate) is high..reforming the nature of this regulatory overhead is goodness.
Overall, the system can be improved significantly... now is it the biggest problem in the world...likely not... healthcare, traditional education, and other issues are quite a bit more important to attack first.
I feel like a lot of Republican critiques on America and woke ism have some validity - as do leftist and liberal critiques of many of our institutions. The problem is, Trump is using that as an opening to control everything, by greatly lessening American strength. Hes throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and not to reform but to control.
Yes, sure, these might all be valid points, but do you believe that is what they are actually trying to achieve? And that this is a good way to do that?
A part of the “genius” of Trump is that he says so many different and vague things that everyone is able to project their own issues into him and find explanations that make his behaviour reasonable, justifiable and perhaps even desirable. But Trump is not in fact doing what we hope he is doing, and it is this projective sanewashing that keeps us blind to the dangers and consequences of his actions.
Well.... I am not a big fan of the "stable genius" ....so we hope for the best.
An old joke related to research overhead:
"I don't know why you guys in the physics department keep demanding all this expensive equipment. All the mathematics department asks for is paper, pencils, and wastebaskets, and the philosophy department doesn't even ask for wastebaskets!"
There is a great discussion to be had about overhead rates. Setting the rates to "starvation and destruction" strangles that discussion in its cradle.
I would love to see the PI have a lot more input into this process.
As a PI I would too. But we live in the real world, and that option is absolutely not going to be on the table from this administration.
"So if Trump and Musk care at all about the wealth and security of the nation"...that indeed is the question here
Consider the use of 'have become' in the following Noah quote from above: "Racially discriminatory hiring practices are hard to measure, but they appear to have become fairly commonplace in the sciences." The implication is that hiring practices were once race neutral but are now, thanks to DEI, racially discriminatory. I would argue that hiring practices were once quietly and implicitly discriminatory in favor of one particular racial & gender set, and have now become loudly and explicitly in favor of a different racial & gender set.
So was the quote by the NIH researcher shown in the article saying “we for sure don’t want to hire white men”, is that the old quiet and implicit discrimination or the new loud and explicit kind?
Quiet and explicit.
Excellent!
There is a significantly longer list of US Government funded R&D achievements. It is also important that the greatest US Research achievements came primarily at Corporate Research Centers. Like Sarnoff/RCA, Bell Labs/ATT, GE Schenectady, IBM. Some of course at many Universities. Almost none at startups.
Arguably, Jobs and Wozniak succeeded because Personal computer development never needed any big facility. In fact, their success was totally derivative from Bell Labs/ Transister, Fairchild/Semiconductor, and Hewlett Packard.
US federal R&D - created
Optics and optical products
Itek - 1st Satellite reconnaissance photography.
Led to Hughes funded develop Semiconductor optical lithography.
Which enabled Semiconductors for memory, multi transistor integrated circuits
Fiber optics and laser development at Bell Labs secretly allowed their use as deep sea submarine sensors. Small Weight distorts the optical signal.
Someone had a great overview of just Bell Labs contributions.
Looking at NSF funded research in 2024 it is primarily AI, advanced computing, quantum computing and advanced wireless networking, semiconductors and sustainable polymers. But it also spent money on promoting schools to observe solar eclipses, which is not basic research nor well spent money. And all of the breakthroughs in AI, semiconductors and quantum computers were from Microsoft, Alphabet, NVidia, Apple and other private companies. I can’t recall one from national laboratories or other research institutions.
https://www.nsf.gov/science-matters/nsf-2024-investing-nations-scientific-competitive-future
> For this reason, I hope Trump’s purge fails, but I also hope that the scientific establishment responds to the purge by simply ditching the politicized crap of 2020-2024 and returning to a stance of political neutrality.
So you want the purge to fail, but the leftist crap to be gone? For science to go back to being science the purge has to succeed. For the patient to live, the cancer has to be destroyed. You can't have it both ways. This sounds similar to your position on the Democratic party. You want everyone to just forget what happened and go back to being a reasonable social democratic party, but still consisting of all the same people who have forced their extremist ideology onto everything they have touched. How can you possibly believe either of these things is going to happen?
"The only way to remove DEI hiring practices from the field is to literally burn all science to the ground." - A Substack commenter.
Great post. The impact of science is so direct as the fact that the pandemic was much shorter, leading to a less pronounced fall in GDP. In regards to FElon, one would think that the great engineer would appreciate science, but apparently he has too narrow of a vision and believes in some kind of computer powered Darwinism.
The only pandemic research that was significant was Project Warp Speed created by Trump 1.0 which made the vaccines available way ahead of schedule in 9 months when Fauci said it would take 18 months. Project DeFuse funded in 2018 for gain of function research at Wuhan Institute of Virology and the subsequent coverup of this data by the Proximal Origins paper by Fauci and Collins likely contributed to the actual pandemic happening, but those felons are now protected by blanket preemptive pardons, so will not be investigated or prosecuted.
Some will find it offensive, but demanding DEI fealty statements from those involved in the sciences is antithetical. Those were attempts to gain political power by controlling people's behavior and thinking. In so doing, the DEI programs distract from the actual discipline necessary to accomplish progress in the fields of science. The sciences must remain neutral with regard to political perspective. Taking the knee in fealty can lead to very poor outcomes. Just look at the US Senate. Where have honor, integrity and leadership gone? Trump's attack on DEI programs has little to do with re-establishing balance and is merely a political lever he pulls in order to usurp control over society. Trump lives and breathes the Marxist/Postmodernist messages from the authoritarian playbook. For Trump, this is all about personal power and control. It has nothing to do with the efficiency, functioning and advancement of society. "The People" is an authoritarian lever he pulls. He could not care less about the citizens of the United States.
The "hard sciences" threaten the Humpty Dumpty narrative - when I use a word it means what I want it to mean. The lab is the school of hard knocks. Hypothesis - cell growth will increase if I increase pH of culture medium. Go into the lab - whoops I'm wrong. Not just I might be wrong, just wrong. So scientists learn that "the truth is out there".
This is very distinct from pundit land where NASDAQ goes up and explanation is NVIDIA reported strong earnings but if the market goes down NVIDIA news was already priced into the market! The same facts justify opposite conclusions. No one learns a fundamental truth in this punditry (Of course, this is job security for anyone opining on the economy - we'll never know with high certainty. Happily for Noah this means he'll be able to write economic commentary for decades as we try to figure out what combination of factors results in great economic results).
Needless to say a reality orientation is deeply threatening to the big lie. Although there has been recent discussion about falsification of research this is a very tiny part of the entire research enterprise. Scientific progress is largely tied to doing good experimental work, publicizing that work and being recognized (grants) to build on the work. The drive to publish distinguishes academic research from private research where confidential information is perceived as a competitive advantage.
There is a time value to knowledge! Putting information quickly into the public domain (even if patented) starts the economically impactful development process. Academics prioritize publicity, private companies confidentiality.
Finally ROI focuses private research on short term payoff. As an example the microbiome work goes back decades to cockroaches and other creatures. As Noah noted great tabloid headline - researcher studies cockroach disease! But these studies led into the ongoing work on the human microbiome which (in a decade or two) is likely to result in medical interventions that improve human health.
So let me close with Noah's words - "An experiment I would prefer not to conduct" and let me rephrase" "Don't fucking do it". In a probabilistic sense russian roulette with all chambers loaded.
In the course of my career in the biopharma industry, I have been fortunate enough to take part in some meetings on this topic. There is a nexus between industry funded research and the basic science funded by USDA, NIH, NSF, and even DOD (would we have the Internet without DOD funding; probably but it might have arrived later than it did). A very useful symposium was held by the University of Pennsylvania back in December 1982. The proceedings published as "Partners in the Research Enterprise: University-Corporate Relations in Science and Technology" is a valid today as it was over forty years ago (alas, the University of Pennsylvania Press only has a very expensive volume in print). In particular, the paper by then Genentech general counsel, Thomas Kiley, had a nice presentation on licensing revenues and showed how the return on Federal research investment is magnified by the development of new technologies and industries. Afterall, these companies and their employees pay taxes back to the US government.
I'll leave aside the discussion of DEI other than to note one thing. I'm involved with the NIH through a non-profit where I am Board Chair. One of the interesting things about NIH is that back in the 1950s when most universities had anti-nepotism regulations, the NIH hired a number of husband and wife medical scientists as well women to full time positions in the intramural program located in Bethesda. Many of these women had outstanding research careers and were honored by election to the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. Most of the younger generation does not realize how opportunities to pursue scientific careers were limited in this period.
The husband wife co-hiring was probably to limit rejections because of the spouse for jobs which required moving, not as a way to include more women. Even now of such a policy if done in a gender neutral way, probably wouldn’t be considered DEI unless you argued it discriminated against unmarried scientists.
I don’t really know but I’m skeptical that it’s a big problem to have diversity as an intention.
If you want the smartest most capable researchers, then putting weight on their ethnic or sexual diversity means you are bound to hire some who are less capable. You could argue that capability isn’t the most important factor, but is there any evidence that diversity alone is a benefit? If you had a team of all Asian women compared to a group of researchers of mixed races and sexes, would you expect both groups to get equivalent results if they didn’t control for capability?
You have it backwards. If the system is only putting an ethically defined group of people in positions of power and influence, then you are missing out on the capabilities of the rest of the nation.
Just over a month into the Trump administration, he has politicized military leadership, closed national parks, betrayed freedom abroad, and is actively working to make the economy worse in the short term and long term. And all of this in an effort to break our constitution and take as much power as the compliant courts and congress let him.
He will lose power at some point - most likely because he's an old man. And when he does it will likely be continued chaos. And hopefully 5-10 years after that we have re-industrialized, re-armed, and re-freedomed. And maybe we can go camping again.
on your latest Econ 102 podcast: I'm no fan of Tim Walz but I think it's kind of disappointing that you didn't do your homework on that whole "misinformation" clip of his. If you actually watch the full interview and not the propaganda clip, he is explicitly referring to spreading lies about election dates or locations, which *is* illegal in the U.S.
Walz was not advocating for any additional restrictions on the first amendment.
You think this is worse than the stuff Elon and Trump say? Really?
There is no first amendment exception for election disinformation, although some states (not the federal government) have laws about spreading false information about voting sites, but must be narrowly tailored to pass constitutional muster.
And though he tries to spin that he’s talking about polling places at the end, he clearly says he thinks that hate speech and misinformation are not allowed by the first amendment when multiple Supreme Court rulings have said the opposite: hate speech and misinformation are protected speech, or did you never hear of Skokie, Illinois?
Here’s the full exchange:
[MARIA TERESA KUMAR, MNSBC HOST]: … I want to talk about what you just mentioned about misinformation, because, oftentimes before, in previous political chapters, disinformation, telling people were to vote the wrong way, that was kind of -- these were called -- considered shenanigans.
But it's becoming more ominous. Can you talk a little bit about that…
WALZ: Oh, yes.
KUMAR: … and what you will do to ensure that there are penalties for that?
WALZ: Yes.
Years ago, it was the little things, telling people to vote the day after the election. And we kind of brushed them off. Now we know it's intimidation at the ballot box. It's undermining the idea that mail-in ballots aren't legal.
I think we need to push back on this. There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy. Tell the truth, where the voting places are, who can vote, who's able to be there….
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/08/08/vp-candidate-tim-walz-on-theres-no-guarantee-to-free-speech-on-misinformation-or-hate-speech-and-especially-around-our-democracy/
The entire transcript from top to bottom is talking about misinformation regarding voting place/mail-in ballot disinformation and intimidation regarding voting rights. Walz mentions "hate speech" exactly once in the concluding sentence. I would not agree with your claim that "he [only] tries to spin that he’s talking about polling places at the end."
Maybe there's more to the transcript than you posted. If so, you should have posted that.
Great post as always Noah!
I have a silly theory that one of America's inner strengths is the belief that we are always the underdog... and that the Republican party so wants to believe this that they are willing to actually make us the underdog by tripping us up. Then, in 10 to 25 years, as the ramifications of these decisions show up, the USA will actually be the underdog. Morally, the world is a lot easier to navigate when you are the underdog, and you can get your citizens on the same page as you are trying to dig out of a hole (even if you also dug it yourself). It is a lot harder to be a fat, rich nation trying to make good decisions...
Maybe conservatives don't trust academic institutions because those institutions have spent 50 years proliferating Leftist garbage like postmodernism, intersectionality, decolonization, and grievance studies.
Put the shoe on the other foot for a moment, progressives. Imagine if you had spent 50 years watching Christians gradually convert every academic and research institution into a mouthpiece for Christian dogma. And then you suddenly got control of the purse strings. Would you let it all continue while you went through and carefully cut only those things that were the most extreme? Or would you stop everything while you did that review? Be honest.
That's what we're doing too.