by try_the_bass | 2025-04-16 07:38:29+00:00
> This is the kind of cool stuff I'm going to miss during the coming dark ages.

I really don't get this level of hyperbole. There's so much hand-wringing about funding getting cut, but it turns out it's like a 15% reduction[0]. That's not an insignificant amount, but it's not the end of the world. Taken naively, that's 15% less research that gets done. One can hope that, being a pillar of academia, the intelligent folks over at Yale can figure out how to spend 15% less on research, so the same amount of research gets done with fewer dollars. Or, better yet, they can put more effort into finding and cutting the rising levels of fraud amongst academic researchers[1].

I think 15% might be too drastic, but at the end of the day, things can't always progress up and to the right, all day every day. If you don't want waste, you sometimes have to cut things, or at the very least apply pressure to them. This mindset of "any cut is bad!" prevents necessary cuts, especially when coupled with this "everyone gets a voice" mindset, simply because you can always find someone to speak up in protection of anything--even fraud! I'd say you'd be surprised by how vigorously people protest their own innocence when they're clearly participating in bad behavior, but like... _gestures at everything_

Don't get me wrong, I think this administration is going about this in mostly the wrong ways, but the problem is, they're doing something those in the affected academic organizations refused to do, namely: applying sufficient adversity to the system to keep it strong.[2] The fact that fraud among scientific research is increasing over time is ample evidence that they're not doing enough to self-police. I don't know how rigorously studied the phenomenon is, but I've certainly seen an increase in popular science coverage of various frauds and scandals in all kinds of scientific fields over the years. Should we really continue paying and promoting the people who are perpetrating this fraud? (As an aside, I wonder how much money is given back to the government when fraud like this is exposed before the grant is fully filled? Or does it usually escape detection until after the grant has been paid out? Anyone know this?)

When you depend on someone else funding your studies, but don't do sufficient legwork to keep things operating smoothly, why is it a seemingly the end of the world for the organization providing the funding to decide to cut it? This is essentially the ruling demographic says: "we think you're wasting our money, so we're going to give you less of it until we see you do better". I think this is a personally reasonable ask! I think the definition of "do better" is troubling in some cases, but this sort of thing should be happening all the time. I don't understand why you and seemingly so many others seem to think that the government shouldn't ever be cutting funding to research programs, especially when the level of waste just keeps going up? You and others constantly hyperbolize a (admittedly large) cut into "oh no it's the end of the world". But it really isn't, and it's not even really an insurmountable challenge. Run a few plagiarism/LLM checks, fire/expel the worst offenders, and you've already saved a significant fraction of the newfound deficit! Yeah, you might destroy some "promising" careers, but look: attempting to deceive the entire world for personal gain (even if just to maintain a basic standard of living!) probably should come with a pretty stiff penalty. The kind of person who would falsify data for personal gain is only promising to do more of the same for their whole career. They're exactly the kind of people that academia should be vigorously expelling.

To look at it from another angle: Academic research needs to be built on a foundation of trust. There will also always be adversaries in the system, and how hard they have to work to stay hidden is dependent on how much oversight there is. If the oversight is lax, adversaries can thrive, which ultimately erodes trust both within the system and without. If academia (as a nebulous whole) is not doing enough internal oversight to keep adversaries in check, then it falls to those outside academia to try affect this oversight. Given the current capitalistic nature of our society, this tends to come in the form of withholding or cutting funding. The more the trust erodes, the stronger the external response, which is what I think we're seeing today. But while a 15% cut might be "too far" or "too much" or "too inaccurate in allocation", consider that part of the reason these cuts are happening is because those "outside the system" have lost trust in the academic system in this country. In response, they did what they could: elected adversaries of the system as it exists today.

And why have the people who support these cuts lost trust in the academic system? Abstractly, I think this boils down to the contrast between this apparent lack of internal oversight and the nature of academia itself: the pursuit of knowledge. Academia literally exists to discover new truths and present them to the rest of the world. It asks the rest of the world to subsidize this learning in various ways, with the promise that the newfound knowledge will vastly repay the subsidy. But when the knowledge the academic system is putting out is increasingly found to actually be bullshit, it repeatedly breaks this promise.

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Anyway, that's a lot of words to say I think your opinion is wildly hyperbolic and immature. I'm getting tired of folks defending an obviously imperfect system as if every small attack on it is "the end of democracy!" It's not helpful, and it just reinforces the image that folks who hold the same beliefs as yourself are also likely to be equally hyperbolic and immature. It's not a good look.

[0] https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/02/10/nih-slashes-indire...

[1] https://retractionwatch.com/2024/09/24/1-in-7-scientific-pap... unsure the quality of this source, but fraud in research is definitely a thing I've been hearing more and more about, especially with generative AI getting let loose on it by folks with... looser morals

[2] https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience