Billions of dollars have been wiped from research budgets, almost 8,000 grants have been cancelled at NIH and the US National Science Foundation alone, and more than 1,000 NIH employees have been fired.
Normal people in the US MASSIVELY underestimate the damage that has been done to the US by destroying science as a career here, it is sickening and to be honest makes it really hard to even want to try to be a part of this shit society in any meaningful way.
The US is racing towards collapse and scientific institutions included but the real collapse story here is the fact that everybody seems resigned to just letting science go away as if it was a fun hobby and not an existentially necessary pillar holding society up and bulwarking our “economic productivity” with new tools, new perspectives and new safeguards to prevent natural catastrophe from robbing us of success.
That is what I will remember most about this time, that the average person in my society sees supporting science with actual money as something akin to getting distracted about sending cool robots to Mars because it is exciting (which is cool and I think we should do it, but a different argument fundamentally then say funding basic vaccine research).
No, many many many of us will die because we have destroyed the funding of science in the US, many are already dying and yet in the midst of this wave of violence try talking to the average USian and they will act like it is a detail that science has been destroyed here, not one of the primary emergencies.
“We have to focus on the economy” US centrists say brushing the blowing out of the keystone piece of the US economy and basic cohesion of systems within it completely out of frame to focus on abstract fabricated ideas like GDP or stocks or some other nearly meaningless factor with respect to our daily lives.
Collapse is many things, but it is always a product of a refusal to listen in favor of orbiting a comforting theology without examining it closely enough to be disappointed.
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We are already at a point in the collapse where progress in the sciences comes as a trade off. In order to pour millions into R+D, that’s money that can’t be spent on schools and bridges. Science is not free, the society pays the overhead.
The question is whether the society gets a return on the investment or not. Obviously science produces results, but are the results worth the cost?
Joseph Tainter wrote about this in his paper "Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies".
There is a pretty good discussion of this issue around pages 16 onward.
Basically we have this near-religious faith that progress comes from research and new technology, but basically that stopped being true over a generation ago. He shows that the returns to society diminished after all the easy knowledge was figured out.
Scientists don’t drive to the lab looking at homeless people and think “I caused that”. But that’s how the system has been working. We are not creating prosperity.
You are falsely framing science as an elective introduction of new context rather than the professional process of understanding the context we have already been forced into.
We do science to be MORE efficient through a process of understanding the contexts we cannot escape.
As the highest-return solutions are exhausted, only more costly approaches remain to be adopted. As the highest-return ways to produce resources, conduct transactions, process information, and organize society are pro- gressively implemented, adaptive problems must be addressed by more costly and less effective responses. As the costs of solutions grow, the point is reached where further investments in complexity do not give a propor- tionate return.
where further investments in complexity do not give a proportionate return.
Science is not the pursuit of complexity, nor of power, it is the pursuit of understanding. The fact that you don’t seem to grasp that is alarming and must be indicative of a lack in interest in you of Science beyond its intersections with Technology even as you condemn Technology…
I am insulted as someone who believes deeply in Science as first and foremost a commitment to understanding the world around us. This isn’t about making transistors smaller or jet engines higher thrust so Number Go Up and you insult countless Scientists by making the generalization that it is.
What’s your definition of complexity?
I’m using it in the collapse science definition.
Why is it relevant? You are falling prey to a similar logical fallacy that people do with evolution by assuming that the path of evolution is always towards more complexity.
Most people probably do believe that evolution always leads to more complexity, the classic image of an ape evolving to a human walking upright is rooted in the center of most people’s subconscious understanding of how complexity arises and evolves within systems that variously reward it.
In reality however that is a serious thinking error, evolution can be a forcing towards more or less complexity, it depends on the environment. Similarly, Science does not necessarily produce more complexity nor does it value it as a product, to the contrary a major concern of Science is often taking a whole set of half explanations that fit together in confounding, complex and contradicting ways and resolving them into a comparatively elegant theory that gets to the heart of the nature of the thing trying to be understood.
You seem to be locked into a belief that Science leads to more and more complexity necessarily and that assumption fails at a philosophical level before we even get into specifics.
Pseudo-Science which abounds and is always trying to drown us in self-inflicted suffering is a form of complexity, false beliefs grounded in nothing that require very specific rules to be followed with no real explanation are complexity (hence why we came up with the term “Cargo Cult”), overly oppressive theological ideologies are complex and brutalize people through their arbitrary complexity. Science is often the only way to defang these forms of complexity and the answers Science gives are often far less “complicated” than the bullshit people come up with to explain things they can’t explain.
Ok, wait a second.
WHAT is complexity in this context? Define please.
Complexity =/= complicated. You are going off on a reaction without even understanding my argument or the conceptual framework I’m coming in from.
If wasn’t 100% correct in the analysis that scientific production requires complexity, then you have no complaint about modern government funding major institutions to go acquire more knowledge, your issue is moot. Just go do science. Einstein worked in a patent office. What’s the issue?
You define it, it makes my head hurt thinking about it.
To put it another way, complexity is the encapsulating border we cannot decipher.
We do science to be more efficient, not less.
That’s how collapse accelerates. (Jevons paradox.) Your scholarship of collapse is lacking. Every civilization collapse is at a technological peak.
Technology is problem solving.
Technology is problem creating.
You should back up and read what the academic have already worked out.
Tainter points out in the linked paper that research has TWO functions. One is to create new context (resource discovery). Another is for creating new information (information and communication is around 90% of all science funding now)…
Like, first of all understand what you’re even talking about.
Why are you acting like Science and Technology are the same concept? It completely muddles your arguments.
So science is to be applied towards efficiency?
Or science is purely information?
Which goalpost are you using? (You keep switching every comment.)
I’m saying that it’s both definitiona, the more all encompassing idea. This is how Tainter approaches it also.
Simple question for you: is science sustainable?
Take for example the purely monetary question…the USA is currently spending more on science research than it already spends on transportation. At what level of scarcity and collapse and resource constraint would be a point where that seems likely to be a tradeoff not worth making?
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With all due respect, do you know that more money is spent on Science than the entire defense budget?
Like I take your point, but also it’s more complicated. I’d argue that zero science can be done without policing the worlds shipping lanes and supply chains. There is possibly a lot of waste corruption and destruction in the defense budget BUT…
Further down the comments in this very discussion someone starts talking about how Einstein and the theory of relativity began the development that causes the GPS grid.
I could advance an argument that ALL the current high technology is a product of public defense spending and not science funding. Like virtually all the technology inside the modern cell phone originated as defense spending that was then given over free of charge to large corporations to make consumer products and privatize the profits. (Touch screens computers, radio, satellites, GPS, the internet etc are from military).
Like, it’s not as pure an example as I think you’re hoping to make. There absolutely is a clear high return on investment on part of defense spending. A lot of pure science doesn’t create this kind of result.
I think it’s proof that we are civilizationally pretty broken that this could happen, but also it’s nice to look at it realistically and consider what this means about us.
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No, I didn’t make it up.
Most people haven’t ever thought about this or checked their assumptions and biases. And I say that because you’re assuming I made it up but YOU don’t actually have the figures. Very interesting.
You want the citation or can you look it up all on your own?
I’ll give you a hint. Its very hard to find any citation that will compare defense to science in a direct way.
What you can easily do is find a number for the science spending as a percentage of GDP, and a number that gives you the defense budget with identical terms.
Once you check you are welcome to report back if you disagree.
So this will really require two citations and some critical thinking
[ * elsewhere I commented that we spend more on science in the USA than rhe transportation sector. Feel free to check that also, but again, you can’t read this anywhere except by asking the questions yourself.]
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Lazy. Weak argument.
