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You’re making two big mistakes in that comparison. The obvious one is simply magnitude: people are losing funding for entire labs and research projects years in
by acdha 2y ago
You’re making two big mistakes in that comparison. The obvious one is simply magnitude: people are losing funding for entire labs and research projects years in the making, which details careers and destroys capacity which will have to be rebuilt when America resumes funding research.
The second error is conflating the impact on research: losing a grant _prevents_ science from happening but those DEI changes were very minor additions to an existing research program. Doing outreach doesn’t harm science, and often helps the researcher improve their ability to communicate their work to non-specialists. Considering a wider range of students or employees similarly doesn’t hurt research: you still didn’t have to hire someone unqualified, but maybe you gave a chance to someone from a less-prestigious university. In some cases, it even made for better science: for example, medical and safety research being careful to include women in their experiment planning benefits half of the population.
- foxglacier 2y ago"destroys capacity which will have to be rebuilt" Maybe that's a good thing to break up some of the corruption and waste in the system. Or maybe it doesn't have to be rebuilt because there's already too much publicly funded science? There has to be an optimum amount and who's to say we're not already above that? Of course if money was free, then the more the merrier. But remember everything the government spends comes at the expense of opportunity cost, either to the government or the people paying for it in tax and inflation.