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Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation

233 points by jbegley 1y ago

dfilppi 1y ago
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vessenes 1y ago
Good read; too long to sway public opinion though. The most convincing and interesting thing I’ve read about the US’s science standing is just a reminder that it wasn’t always considered a global science leader. A few people saw the opportunity created by Nazi ideological purges of scientists and built, among other things, Princeton’s IAS. Considered most charitably, the current administration sees itself as trying to return to an era of imperialism for the good of the country. In this area I wonder how resilient and immobile the scientific community is to these stresses. If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers.
- mistrial9 1y ago
  respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself. secondly, sitting in California, this repeated cool-kid refs to Nazis is just more knee-jerk polarization. Serious topics are at hand. Excess and overly-optimistic polarizing rhetoric with smug bank accounts are a root cause of this recent extreme swing in Federal powers. IMHO
  - voxl 1y ago
    This is not a knee jerk mention of Nazis, it is a well known fact that after world war II the US changed strategy to invest in research and pull the best talent from around the world. That was in part motivated by German scientists fleeing Nazi Germany.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself. That's the problem of the tiktokification of public discourse. Attention spans of the wide masses are really, really low, everything longer than a tiktok or youtube short just gets dismissed as "too long, didn't read". Trump, for all his faults, is a master of that - each of his speeches is not designed to be appealing to the audience, but to be cut into very short "soundbites" that just convey the core message.
  - watwut 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - jppittma 1y ago
    I think your perspective on this matters a lot less than that of the researchers. Their perception is that what’s happening at Harvard and NSF is fascism. The perception is that we have a gestapo in ICE arresting mayors and judges, an admin talking about suspending habeas corpus, going after scientists who come to conclusions they don’t like, and just gutting funding for research in general. You can say, “oh this is hyperbole” and “these people are wrong to leave,” but all that really gonna matter is that they were terrified and left.
  - alabastervlog 1y ago
    > respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself. I have very bad news for you re: the last ~70 years of research on voter behavior in democracies. The story of the field is, if I may paint it a bit poetically, researchers hiding under their desks and rocking back and forth going "it can't be that bad... it can't really work like that..." until they gin up the courage to look again, find it's even worse than they thought, and repeat the cycle.
  - fads_go 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - vessenes 1y ago
    I'd say the swing in Federal powers comes from the real income dropping for most Americans over the last 30 years. Nobody wants to be told "this is great!" when it is not. Especially when it's "Macroeconomists say this is great!". Bread and circuses -- the prior administrations, regardless of political camp, have delivered neither the circus nor the bread. People want to try something else. That's in my opinion totally orthogonal to the aims of those digging in Federally right now; those aims are fairly diverse in my opinion, if themed.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers. European universities would love to do so, the problem is that our model of funding is just as braindead as it is in the US (if not worse, like in Germany) and our politicians are too braindead or unwilling to fix the circumstances.
  - deleted 1y ago
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  - atemerev 1y ago
    There are no free countries wealthy enough to do that. European salaries in the academia are laughable even by American academic standards, including supposedly rich countries like Germany and Netherlands. Switzerland is too small, and cut her scientific funding recently as well. UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia etc are authoritarian petrostates. One country that will actually drain American researchers will be China.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      > One country that will actually drain American researchers will be China. Not really. Even if they'd shower American scientists in money, who will guarantee they won't be taken hostage in a political conflict? It has happened in the past [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_and_Michael_Kovrig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_an...
- bad_haircut72 1y ago
  IMHO America's success as a scientific powerhouse had more to do with the research infrastructure spun up to win the war than Nazi scientists afterwards.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > America's success as a scientific powerhouse had more to do with the research infrastructure spun up to win the war than Nazi scientists afterwards Bit of A, bit of B, with B encompassing the Nazis and the British.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
    Parent comment says "the opportunity created by Nazi ideological purges of scientists" , which is not the same as "Nazi scientists". Did you see the "Oppenheimer" movie? Check the real physicists depicted working on the Manhattan project. A large number of them were European Jews who left before or during the war. Einstein, Teller, Szilard, Hornig. Even some others left Europe because of this: Niels Bohr (Jewish Mother) and Enrico Fermi (Jewish Wife). To be sure there was Wernher von Braun and co as well. In fact, it would be quicker to list the Manhattan project physicists depicted in that movie who were not Jewish at all: * Ernest Lawrence * Luis Walter Alvarez
    - AStonesThrow 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - ben_w 1y ago
        > Is America enough of a "melting pot" that we can withstand that sort of outsized foreign influence within our borders? Depends. If your idea of America consists of just the pre-colonial native groups, Navajo etc., then America was already gone a century and a half ago. But the America of 1925 had exactly the same arguments about Italians, and of 1845 about the Irish, in that the local born were complaining a lot and didn't trust the newcomers. The melting pot has been melting for a long time now; you're a big endless stew of a country. (Except for the "real" natives, if there is such a thing).
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > too long to sway public opinion Our founders were aware of the perils of letting public opinion write public policy. We’ve spent a lot of the post-Cold War era dismantling that anti-populist infrastructure. To the extent I see a guiding light out of this mess, it’s in reducing the electoral fetishism that has dominated post-90s democratic discourse. There is more to democracy (and more pointedly, republics) than popular will. To the extent there is a silver lining in MAGA, it’s that the numpties have given us the tools with which to accomplish this if we choose to.
  - deleted 1y ago
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  - candiddevmike 1y ago
    The US has (almost by design?) a system the favors tyranny of the minority. I'd argue the opposite: that the majority of voters are not well represented. Our two party system with capped Congress member count (which is reflected in the executive branch) and useless Senate only serve a minority of (monied) interests in the country.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > the majority of voters are not well represented The majority are well represented. They’re just idiots. This isn’t a criticism of Americans; it’s why direct democracy fails in a predictable, partisan way in any society. (If you really think about it, you’re probably something of an idiot a good amount of the time. And you, like me, probably hold stupid views with low conviction because it was never worth it to do the research.)
  - kmeisthax 1y ago
    You're broadly right, but I would argue that the "anti-populist infrastructure" is specifically responsible for electoral fetishism. The thing to remember is that in the 1950s and 60s the US government was basically running a censorship regime and had manufactured an anti-Communist consensus. They had to do this because democratic politics back then meant political parties actually listening to their constituents. In other words, America had populist infrastructure, which the state had to carefully commandeer to maintain the illusion of a unified society willing to fight a Cold War against a country which, at least on paper, was promising a better America than America. This broke in the 70s, when the Vietnam War pitted young Boomers against old[0]. A lot of the civic institutions that were powering democracy in that era got torn apart along age lines, and fell apart completely. Politics turned from something you made with your voice to something you purchased with your vote. This is how we got the Carter / Reagan neoliberal consensus of "free trade and open borders for me but not for thee". The state was free to dictate this new public policy to its citizens because the citizenry were too busy fighting to mount an effective opposition to it. [0] Recall that "Baby Boomer" is actually two generations of people, both because the baby boom was so long and because America's access to birth control was on par with that of a third world country. There's a never-ending wellspring of parental abandonment in that generation.
- sepositus 1y ago
  > If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers. My perception (probably skewed by overly negative media) is that the US is leading a global trend (emphasis on leading). It feels like the world is too busy preparing for war or economic gloom than trying to poach scientists.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Somebody should really tell the world about the artificial sun scientists cooked up last time we asked them to focus all their attention at war stuff.
  - neomantra 1y ago
    Counterpoint via anecdotes… this week I am at the International Symposium for Green Chemistry. >600 chemists from all over the world. They are all psyched to advance safer and sustainable solutions to a wide variety of problems. You see all their funding sources from the UN to EU to country to city to local, as well as private companies. You see their collaboration and enthusiasm. Of course the US comes up… but it seems that the rest of the world is just moving on without us (I am American). Our government is simply an unreliable partner. Some US PhD candidates here are looking for post-doc labs in the EU. A speaker for Dow Chemical was talking about their Year 2050+ plan for net-zero CO2 and circular economy. I was surprised to learn (news was last month) that Dow cancelled their $9B net-zero ethylene processing facility in Canada because US tariffs will make it too expensive (to build it and long term it’s the source of ethylene). Imagine the jobs lost, contracts lost, US exports lost, and environmental damage. This morning I had this conversation (before seeing OP): “If all the US university research funding disintegrates, how does that affect the primacy of US science education? How should somebody applying to college now think about this?” Perhaps focus on a teaching-focused college and then try to do the research abroad? Of course such choices are more easily available to the wealthy. US higher science education and industry will just naturally decline? Random: Only one talk I’ve seen so far included a GitHub repo. Separately, I have multiple friends who lost their US lab funding and/or jobs. I also have a friend who was being poached via Dutch Visa fast-track. I think the science brain drain is real.
- burkaman 1y ago
  They're working on it: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/05/europe-launches-program-to-lure-scientists-away-from-the-us/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/05/europe-launches-prog... Here's an article from a European perspective: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/usa-scientists-looking-to-leave-the-u-s-for-more-welcoming-environments-a-989ca73f-1dc9-4205-8405-1dc901c3623a#ref=rss https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/usa-scientists-lo...
  - mettamage 1y ago
    500 million euro's to attract scientists? I asked ChatGPT, it thought for 3 minutes and 36 seconds. You can see the Q&A here [1]. Assuming that a one year salary of the average scientist is 100K euro's [2] then that means you're trying to attract an extra 1250 scientists that will work for 4 years. That doesn't sound like a lot on a continental scale. [1] https://chatgpt.com/share/682376a6-5c68-8005-89ab-2bedd453c754 https://chatgpt.com/share/682376a6-5c68-8005-89ab-2bedd453c7... [2] It's definitely lower than 100K, but it allows for unexpected hidden overhead that ChatGPT potentially didn't account for.
    - vessenes 1y ago
      Here’s the thing: scientists follow roughly a double power law in breakthrough and skills. What if that 1250 is 50 top tier and 1200 of their chosen lab mates?
      - mettamage 1y ago
        That's fair
    - burkaman 1y ago
      I respect your opinion, to me it does sound like a lot, and it's also on top of many existing programs and a few other new things included in this announcement. > The initiative also includes a target for member states to allocate 3 percent of their GDP to R&D projects by 2030. [...] The plan, originally proposed by the French government, also proposes creating long-term “super grants” for outstanding researchers, to provide them with financial stability; these would last for seven years. The program also plans to double the amount of financial support available this year for those who decide to move to the European Union. You can get a sense of everything they have available here: https://commission.europa.eu/topics/research-and-innovation/choose-europe_en https://commission.europa.eu/topics/research-and-innovation/....
- galoisscobi 1y ago
  > Good read; too long to sway public opinion though. Maybe they should have done a TikTok or a YT short? Would that be the right length?
  - Onawa 1y ago
    Honestly, yes. To sway public opinion, you have to meet your audience where they get their information. I know that my mother gets most of her news from TikTok unfortunately. Reaching out to the public through as many avenues as possible is absolutely necessary at this point.
    - wsintra2022 1y ago
      Depends which public your trying to sway.
      - layer8 1y ago
        The one with a long attention span is clearly a minority.
  - vessenes 1y ago
    Audience. This will only reach people who agree. It's a lesson Dems just haven't learned yet about where America is in discourse: Hillary: "This great economy, based on the new globalization means that we will with the help of economists transform Pennsylvania's economic infrastructure away from dirty fuels." Donald: "I'm going to save coal." Kamala: "My macroeconomists say this is the best economy the US has ever seen, and they say my plan to help will put money back in American pockets" Donald: "No taxes on tips."
    - LexiMax 1y ago
      This is something that most people engaged in internet discourse could learn as well. It's often not productive to write a long response to a pithy sound-byte argument. Not only is that losing the engagement economy, but onlookers to the thread are far more likely to read and latch onto the smaller soundbites. Longer replies also give critics more gristle to latch onto - you may think a long post covers all its bases, but you're really just giving people more avenues of rebuttable. Better to be succinct, and if important context is left out, respond to it as concerns are raised.
- ty6853 1y ago
  Not just the Nazis. The Russians had Lysenkoism. It's a common characteristics of states that start consolidating enough power to nationalize science funding. They often eventually use it to wield power.
- pbhjpbhj 1y ago
  >Considered most charitably, the current administration sees itself as trying to return to an era of imperialism for the good of the country. I mean there's charitable interpretation, then there's being an emu and pretending that the transfer of massive wealth to Trump and his cronies through stock market manipulation (after removing checks on said manipulation, apparently) isn't just wide scale theft. $3.4B to only two of Trump's circle {Trump bragged in a recent video} direct from the pockets of regular investors through market manipulation - I could well imagine the total is trillions. 'I'm stealing from you for your own good'! Hmm.
  - vessenes 1y ago
    Oh it's clearly a kleptocracy at the top, don't get me wrong. You can have both.
    - pbhjpbhj 1y ago
      There imperialism, sure, but the "for the good of the country" is very clearly not true.
oldpersonintx 1y ago
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amanaplanacanal 1y ago
Evidently the president appointed one of his personal attorneys to be the new librarian of Congress. The library turned him away because Congress hasn't approved him. It seems it's becoming more of a clusterfuck just about every day.
- throwaway5752 1y ago
  It's not a clusterfuck. The librarian of congress move was a deliberate hostile attempt attempt by the executive to take control over the legislative branch. Just like AFL vs John Roberts is a hostile attempt to take over the judicial. It's an concerted attempted authoritarian takeover through bureaucratic methods. When they exhaust this, you'll see them frustrated and declare states of emergencies. The founders wrote about this in the Federalist Papers, people like this have always existed.
  - pbhjpbhj 1y ago
    "It's not a clustefuck" ... proceeds to describe a clusterfuck ... What was your intention here?
    - throwaway5752 1y ago
      A clusterfuck describes chaos and disorganization. This is just a deliberate attack, it is being executed well. It is just malicious.
      - postalrat 1y ago
        People will prefer calling it both malicious and disorganized. Well executed sounds too positive.
        lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
        Calling it well-executed is pragmatic. There's no reason to avoid positive-sounding things if they're true, especially not because it's positive. If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. -- Sun Tzu, The Art of War
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Related: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43935913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43935913
howmayiannoyyou 1y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shFUDPqVmTg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shFUDPqVmTg Sabine highlights the problem with scientific funding in this video and it should be required watching before posting on this thread. Reform is needed. Some good will be tossed with a lot of bad. Its a cycle, a pendulum, and it will eventually tip to excess again sometime in the future. For now... fixing what is broken ought to be the priority.
- Onawa 1y ago
  Counterpoint, please consider watching Professor Dave discuss the issues with Sabine's talking points. While there are certainly problems within science, Sabine has the most nihilistic view of the field. https://youtu.be/nJjPH3TQif0 https://youtu.be/nJjPH3TQif0
  - ben_w 1y ago
    I think there may be a language issue here; to use her own words as best as I can remember them, excusing her bluntness under "perhaps I'm just German" — a messy kichen here in Germany would be described with the word "Chaos", and a mistake that a Brit would call "dropping the ball" would be described as "eine totale Shitshow". This doesn't render her immune to the lifecycle of physicists, of course: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556 https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556 and https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/ But that means I don't put too much credence to her summary of climate science or trans stuff: when it's the topic of inclusivity attempts, she's got the direct personal experience to play the "here's how well intentioned policies backfire" card; when it's the internal politics within science, honestly that reminds me a lot of software development's cycle of which language, framework, design pattern, and organisational orientation pattern (objects, composition, functional, etc.) is a code smell or the smell of coffee that one should wake up to, so it rings true even if I can't verify it.
  - simpaticoder 1y ago
    >Sabine has the most nihilistic view of the field "The field" in her case is "particle physics". And she's been making a very good case against the non-science being done in that field. Unfortunately, like physicists tend to do, for some reason, she's branched out into criticizing "not her field" as well, sometimes even non-science topics, to far worse effect. She's become an excellent example of audience capture, a loss to us all (and a loss to credibility she earned within particle physics).
Onawa 1y ago
As a federal contractor within NIH, I can tell you that the damage has already been done to the United States' dominance in science. Even if every action taken by current administration is reversed, the uncertainty for foreign scientists is too much. Many that I have spoken to are looking for their exit from either gov or academic research, or looking to leave the United States completely. The Trump admins cuts are not likely to be reversed until at minimum 2029 if Democrats are able to take the White House. But the entire scientific pipeline has been disrupted. Science has always had "passion profession" tax, but at this point I would strongly recommend anyone pursuing life sciences or government research to either consider another field, or realize that you will most likely end up in industry. Things are quite bleak right now...
- glitchc 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - maxfurman 1y ago
    You are aware that scientists have to eat and pay rent, right? A lack of funding in the US will draw scientists to places that do have funding. You're confusing "science in the US now" with "all science globally."
  - miltonlost 1y ago
    In your "long-term" world view, apparently the lives of scientists in the here and now doesn't matter
  - Facemelters 1y ago
    please refer to a chart of scientific progress that encompasses both those years and the post WWII expansion of the US science state
  - eig 1y ago
    The parent commenter is not speaking about science as a whole, they are speaking about US dominance in science. You state that "hiccup won't stop or even slow down science in the US. All it will do is take government out of the equation." I disagree and I would suspect most scientists reading that statement would also disagree. I too have seen many bright people turning away from the US because of this. I am personally certain that these policies will significantly slow down science in the US. After all, when David Hilbert was asked in 1934 "How is mathematics at Göttingen, now that it is free from the Jewish influence?", he replied “There is no mathematics in Göttingen, anymore”.
xqcgrek2 1y ago
[flagged]
- gbanfalvi 1y ago
  Agreed. Nepotism is the way forward.
- Hikikomori 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - bitlax 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - Ar-Curunir 1y ago
      8 years ago. And also, much better than the stuff that goes viral on twitter today, like Kanye's latest Nazi song, along with defenses of people singing along to it.
      - bitlax 1y ago
        Sir, this is a Wendy's.
- nailer 1y ago
  I’m not sure why this is being voted down. The NSF did actively pursue DEI and the US government is obligated not to fund organizations that discriminate based on race.
  - Ar-Curunir 1y ago
    The NSF only had “DEI” requirements (really just requiring grants to have a section on vague Broadening Participation guarantees) due to Congress-mandated laws.
  - malcolmgreaves 1y ago
nickledave 1y ago
the tl;dr: > The NSF’s investments have shaped some of the most transformative technologies of our time—from GPS to the internet—and supported vital research in the social and behavioral sciences that helps the nation understand itself and evaluate its progress toward its democratic ideals. So in 2024, I was honored to be appointed to the National Science Board, which is charged under 42 U.S. Code § 1863 with establishing the policies of the Foundation and providing oversight of its mission. > But the meaning of oversight changed with the arrival of DOGE. That historical tension—between the promise of scientific freedom and the peril of political control—may now be resurfacing in troubling ways. Last month, when a National Science Board statement was released on occasion of the April 2025 resignation of Trump-appointed NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, it was done so without the participation or notice of all members of the Board. > Last week, as the Board held its 494th meeting, I listened to NSF staff say that DOGE had by fiat the authority to give thumbs up or down to grant applications which had been systematically vetted by layers of subject matter experts. > Our closed-to-the-public deliberations were observed by Zachary Terrell from the DOGE team. Through his Zoom screen, Terrell showed more interest in his water bottle and his cuticles than in the discussion. According to Nature Terrell, listed as a "consultant" in the NSF directory, had accessed the NSF awards system to block the dispersal of approved grants. The message I received was that the National Science Board had a role to play in name only. I can't sum up everything that's wrong with this moment better than that. This is not some necessary pain that comes with shaking up the system. This is a hostile takeover of the federal government by embarrassingly ignorant goons who think they know everything, just because they can vibe code an almost functional app. This is what happens when you have VCs huffing their own farts in their Signal echo chamber: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t.... Congratulations, you buffoons, you have demonstrated there are scaling laws for footguns.
- blackhaj7 1y ago
  "This is what happens when you have VCs huffing their own farts in their Signal echo chamber" Superb, take a bow!
- conn10mfan 1y ago
  that semaphore article is pretty interesting, there is a whole body of work being developed by folks like Gil Duran, Naomi Klein, Emil Torres, etc. right now diving into the Tech Right and characters like Andreessen one thing I'm struck by is the willingness of people who greatly benefitted from the downstream effects of basic research (ex: the entire internet economy being downstream of DARPA, CERN, etc.) to tear down basic research, to .... unleash science? take Peter Thiel for instance, across Youtube, blogs, and articles you can hear him railing against science and how it's stuck in the 70s...there almost seems to be this Silicon Valley disdain for science & scientific research and I'd love to understand why engineer/innovator characters are so antagonistic to researchers Thiel on Science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbk5Lccr_e0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbk5Lccr_e0 (aside: there is a strong chance these characters are hyper interested in race science, eugenics, and gene modification and they are simply upset about ethics which they euphemistically refer to as "dogmatism")
User23 1y ago
Scientists commit to politics. Election happens. Election has consequences. Shocker. To be fair conservatives warned about this for decades but nobody listened. The only possible response to this propaganda piece are nodding along religiously or revulsion and disgust at the sheer intellectual dishonesty of it. This kind of superficial performative nonsense is a big part of why the replication crisis is as bad as it is. And few scientists are willing to speak of that. I’d love to hear from the scientists whose careers were damaged or destroyed by this person. But I doubt I ever will.
- AlexandrB 1y ago
  It's pretty depressing watching comments here that say anything other than "this is the worst thing ever" or "this is fascism" get downvoted/flagged into oblivion.
  - LexiMax 1y ago
    Any social media site that delegates moderation responsibilities to its users will eventually run into these sorts of problems. At a certain scale, you're almost guaranteed to get moderation via populism simply because the friction for using these tools in bad faith is far too low and there never seems to be enough of a punishment for misuse. Shockingly, I've found Hacker News to be far worse about how it promotes echo chamber behavior than most subreddits, despite how much tougher it is to obtain access to these tools. On the other hand, it's far less of a problem on Tildes, and I suspect that's in large part due to there simply not being a explicit downvote button. However, the fact that "Noisy" and "Spam" tags haven't been abused might simply due to its smaller scale. To be clear, I actually agree with the people downvoting you, despite not doing so myself. But if you find that distasteful, don't hate the player, hate the game.
- anigbrowl 1y ago
  scientists whose careers were damaged or destroyed by this person Please provide some examples of how you think this person destroyed anyone's career.
- UncleMeat 1y ago
gitroom 1y ago
Damn, none of this feels new to me - just feels like every few years it's some other mess hurting science. You ever think this stuff ever really gets fixed or we just keep going in circles forever?
deleted 1y ago
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kundejenny 1y ago
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kundejenny 1y ago
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233 points by jbegley 1y ago

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Good read; too long to sway public opinion though. The most convincing and interesting thing I’ve read about the US’s science standing is just a reminder that it wasn’t always considered a global science leader. A few people saw the opportunity created by Nazi ideological purges of scientists and built, among other things, Princeton’s IAS. Considered most charitably, the current administration sees itself as trying to return to an era of imperialism for the good of the country. In this area I wonder how resilient and immobile the scientific community is to these stresses. If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers.

mistrial9 1y ago
respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself. secondly, sitting in California, this repeated cool-kid refs to Nazis is just more knee-jerk polarization. Serious topics are at hand. Excess and overly-optimistic polarizing rhetoric with smug bank accounts are a root cause of this recent extreme swing in Federal powers. IMHO
- voxl 1y ago
  This is not a knee jerk mention of Nazis, it is a well known fact that after world war II the US changed strategy to invest in research and pull the best talent from around the world. That was in part motivated by German scientists fleeing Nazi Germany.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself. That's the problem of the tiktokification of public discourse. Attention spans of the wide masses are really, really low, everything longer than a tiktok or youtube short just gets dismissed as "too long, didn't read". Trump, for all his faults, is a master of that - each of his speeches is not designed to be appealing to the audience, but to be cut into very short "soundbites" that just convey the core message.
- watwut 1y ago
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- jppittma 1y ago
  I think your perspective on this matters a lot less than that of the researchers. Their perception is that what’s happening at Harvard and NSF is fascism. The perception is that we have a gestapo in ICE arresting mayors and judges, an admin talking about suspending habeas corpus, going after scientists who come to conclusions they don’t like, and just gutting funding for research in general. You can say, “oh this is hyperbole” and “these people are wrong to leave,” but all that really gonna matter is that they were terrified and left.
- alabastervlog 1y ago
  > respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself. I have very bad news for you re: the last ~70 years of research on voter behavior in democracies. The story of the field is, if I may paint it a bit poetically, researchers hiding under their desks and rocking back and forth going "it can't be that bad... it can't really work like that..." until they gin up the courage to look again, find it's even worse than they thought, and repeat the cycle.
- fads_go 1y ago
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- vessenes 1y ago
  I'd say the swing in Federal powers comes from the real income dropping for most Americans over the last 30 years. Nobody wants to be told "this is great!" when it is not. Especially when it's "Macroeconomists say this is great!". Bread and circuses -- the prior administrations, regardless of political camp, have delivered neither the circus nor the bread. People want to try something else. That's in my opinion totally orthogonal to the aims of those digging in Federally right now; those aims are fairly diverse in my opinion, if themed.
mschuster91 1y ago
> If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers. European universities would love to do so, the problem is that our model of funding is just as braindead as it is in the US (if not worse, like in Germany) and our politicians are too braindead or unwilling to fix the circumstances.
- deleted 1y ago
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- atemerev 1y ago
  There are no free countries wealthy enough to do that. European salaries in the academia are laughable even by American academic standards, including supposedly rich countries like Germany and Netherlands. Switzerland is too small, and cut her scientific funding recently as well. UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia etc are authoritarian petrostates. One country that will actually drain American researchers will be China.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > One country that will actually drain American researchers will be China. Not really. Even if they'd shower American scientists in money, who will guarantee they won't be taken hostage in a political conflict? It has happened in the past [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_and_Michael_Kovrig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_an...
bad_haircut72 1y ago
IMHO America's success as a scientific powerhouse had more to do with the research infrastructure spun up to win the war than Nazi scientists afterwards.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > America's success as a scientific powerhouse had more to do with the research infrastructure spun up to win the war than Nazi scientists afterwards Bit of A, bit of B, with B encompassing the Nazis and the British.
- SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
  Parent comment says "the opportunity created by Nazi ideological purges of scientists" , which is not the same as "Nazi scientists". Did you see the "Oppenheimer" movie? Check the real physicists depicted working on the Manhattan project. A large number of them were European Jews who left before or during the war. Einstein, Teller, Szilard, Hornig. Even some others left Europe because of this: Niels Bohr (Jewish Mother) and Enrico Fermi (Jewish Wife). To be sure there was Wernher von Braun and co as well. In fact, it would be quicker to list the Manhattan project physicists depicted in that movie who were not Jewish at all: * Ernest Lawrence * Luis Walter Alvarez
  - AStonesThrow 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - ben_w 1y ago
      > Is America enough of a "melting pot" that we can withstand that sort of outsized foreign influence within our borders? Depends. If your idea of America consists of just the pre-colonial native groups, Navajo etc., then America was already gone a century and a half ago. But the America of 1925 had exactly the same arguments about Italians, and of 1845 about the Irish, in that the local born were complaining a lot and didn't trust the newcomers. The melting pot has been melting for a long time now; you're a big endless stew of a country. (Except for the "real" natives, if there is such a thing).
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> too long to sway public opinion Our founders were aware of the perils of letting public opinion write public policy. We’ve spent a lot of the post-Cold War era dismantling that anti-populist infrastructure. To the extent I see a guiding light out of this mess, it’s in reducing the electoral fetishism that has dominated post-90s democratic discourse. There is more to democracy (and more pointedly, republics) than popular will. To the extent there is a silver lining in MAGA, it’s that the numpties have given us the tools with which to accomplish this if we choose to.
- deleted 1y ago
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- candiddevmike 1y ago
  The US has (almost by design?) a system the favors tyranny of the minority. I'd argue the opposite: that the majority of voters are not well represented. Our two party system with capped Congress member count (which is reflected in the executive branch) and useless Senate only serve a minority of (monied) interests in the country.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > the majority of voters are not well represented The majority are well represented. They’re just idiots. This isn’t a criticism of Americans; it’s why direct democracy fails in a predictable, partisan way in any society. (If you really think about it, you’re probably something of an idiot a good amount of the time. And you, like me, probably hold stupid views with low conviction because it was never worth it to do the research.)
- kmeisthax 1y ago
  You're broadly right, but I would argue that the "anti-populist infrastructure" is specifically responsible for electoral fetishism. The thing to remember is that in the 1950s and 60s the US government was basically running a censorship regime and had manufactured an anti-Communist consensus. They had to do this because democratic politics back then meant political parties actually listening to their constituents. In other words, America had populist infrastructure, which the state had to carefully commandeer to maintain the illusion of a unified society willing to fight a Cold War against a country which, at least on paper, was promising a better America than America. This broke in the 70s, when the Vietnam War pitted young Boomers against old[0]. A lot of the civic institutions that were powering democracy in that era got torn apart along age lines, and fell apart completely. Politics turned from something you made with your voice to something you purchased with your vote. This is how we got the Carter / Reagan neoliberal consensus of "free trade and open borders for me but not for thee". The state was free to dictate this new public policy to its citizens because the citizenry were too busy fighting to mount an effective opposition to it. [0] Recall that "Baby Boomer" is actually two generations of people, both because the baby boom was so long and because America's access to birth control was on par with that of a third world country. There's a never-ending wellspring of parental abandonment in that generation.
sepositus 1y ago
> If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers. My perception (probably skewed by overly negative media) is that the US is leading a global trend (emphasis on leading). It feels like the world is too busy preparing for war or economic gloom than trying to poach scientists.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Somebody should really tell the world about the artificial sun scientists cooked up last time we asked them to focus all their attention at war stuff.
- neomantra 1y ago
  Counterpoint via anecdotes… this week I am at the International Symposium for Green Chemistry. >600 chemists from all over the world. They are all psyched to advance safer and sustainable solutions to a wide variety of problems. You see all their funding sources from the UN to EU to country to city to local, as well as private companies. You see their collaboration and enthusiasm. Of course the US comes up… but it seems that the rest of the world is just moving on without us (I am American). Our government is simply an unreliable partner. Some US PhD candidates here are looking for post-doc labs in the EU. A speaker for Dow Chemical was talking about their Year 2050+ plan for net-zero CO2 and circular economy. I was surprised to learn (news was last month) that Dow cancelled their $9B net-zero ethylene processing facility in Canada because US tariffs will make it too expensive (to build it and long term it’s the source of ethylene). Imagine the jobs lost, contracts lost, US exports lost, and environmental damage. This morning I had this conversation (before seeing OP): “If all the US university research funding disintegrates, how does that affect the primacy of US science education? How should somebody applying to college now think about this?” Perhaps focus on a teaching-focused college and then try to do the research abroad? Of course such choices are more easily available to the wealthy. US higher science education and industry will just naturally decline? Random: Only one talk I’ve seen so far included a GitHub repo. Separately, I have multiple friends who lost their US lab funding and/or jobs. I also have a friend who was being poached via Dutch Visa fast-track. I think the science brain drain is real.
burkaman 1y ago
They're working on it: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/05/europe-launches-program-to-lure-scientists-away-from-the-us/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/05/europe-launches-prog... Here's an article from a European perspective: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/usa-scientists-looking-to-leave-the-u-s-for-more-welcoming-environments-a-989ca73f-1dc9-4205-8405-1dc901c3623a#ref=rss https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/usa-scientists-lo...
- mettamage 1y ago
  500 million euro's to attract scientists? I asked ChatGPT, it thought for 3 minutes and 36 seconds. You can see the Q&A here [1]. Assuming that a one year salary of the average scientist is 100K euro's [2] then that means you're trying to attract an extra 1250 scientists that will work for 4 years. That doesn't sound like a lot on a continental scale. [1] https://chatgpt.com/share/682376a6-5c68-8005-89ab-2bedd453c754 https://chatgpt.com/share/682376a6-5c68-8005-89ab-2bedd453c7... [2] It's definitely lower than 100K, but it allows for unexpected hidden overhead that ChatGPT potentially didn't account for.
  - vessenes 1y ago
    Here’s the thing: scientists follow roughly a double power law in breakthrough and skills. What if that 1250 is 50 top tier and 1200 of their chosen lab mates?
    - mettamage 1y ago
      That's fair
  - burkaman 1y ago
    I respect your opinion, to me it does sound like a lot, and it's also on top of many existing programs and a few other new things included in this announcement. > The initiative also includes a target for member states to allocate 3 percent of their GDP to R&D projects by 2030. [...] The plan, originally proposed by the French government, also proposes creating long-term “super grants” for outstanding researchers, to provide them with financial stability; these would last for seven years. The program also plans to double the amount of financial support available this year for those who decide to move to the European Union. You can get a sense of everything they have available here: https://commission.europa.eu/topics/research-and-innovation/choose-europe_en https://commission.europa.eu/topics/research-and-innovation/....
galoisscobi 1y ago
> Good read; too long to sway public opinion though. Maybe they should have done a TikTok or a YT short? Would that be the right length?
- Onawa 1y ago
  Honestly, yes. To sway public opinion, you have to meet your audience where they get their information. I know that my mother gets most of her news from TikTok unfortunately. Reaching out to the public through as many avenues as possible is absolutely necessary at this point.
  - wsintra2022 1y ago
    Depends which public your trying to sway.
    - layer8 1y ago
      The one with a long attention span is clearly a minority.
- vessenes 1y ago
  Audience. This will only reach people who agree. It's a lesson Dems just haven't learned yet about where America is in discourse: Hillary: "This great economy, based on the new globalization means that we will with the help of economists transform Pennsylvania's economic infrastructure away from dirty fuels." Donald: "I'm going to save coal." Kamala: "My macroeconomists say this is the best economy the US has ever seen, and they say my plan to help will put money back in American pockets" Donald: "No taxes on tips."
  - LexiMax 1y ago
    This is something that most people engaged in internet discourse could learn as well. It's often not productive to write a long response to a pithy sound-byte argument. Not only is that losing the engagement economy, but onlookers to the thread are far more likely to read and latch onto the smaller soundbites. Longer replies also give critics more gristle to latch onto - you may think a long post covers all its bases, but you're really just giving people more avenues of rebuttable. Better to be succinct, and if important context is left out, respond to it as concerns are raised.
ty6853 1y ago
Not just the Nazis. The Russians had Lysenkoism. It's a common characteristics of states that start consolidating enough power to nationalize science funding. They often eventually use it to wield power.
pbhjpbhj 1y ago
>Considered most charitably, the current administration sees itself as trying to return to an era of imperialism for the good of the country. I mean there's charitable interpretation, then there's being an emu and pretending that the transfer of massive wealth to Trump and his cronies through stock market manipulation (after removing checks on said manipulation, apparently) isn't just wide scale theft. $3.4B to only two of Trump's circle {Trump bragged in a recent video} direct from the pockets of regular investors through market manipulation - I could well imagine the total is trillions. 'I'm stealing from you for your own good'! Hmm.
- vessenes 1y ago
  Oh it's clearly a kleptocracy at the top, don't get me wrong. You can have both.
  - pbhjpbhj 1y ago
    There imperialism, sure, but the "for the good of the country" is very clearly not true.

oldpersonintx 1y ago

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amanaplanacanal 1y ago

Evidently the president appointed one of his personal attorneys to be the new librarian of Congress. The library turned him away because Congress hasn't approved him. It seems it's becoming more of a clusterfuck just about every day.

throwaway5752 1y ago
It's not a clusterfuck. The librarian of congress move was a deliberate hostile attempt attempt by the executive to take control over the legislative branch. Just like AFL vs John Roberts is a hostile attempt to take over the judicial. It's an concerted attempted authoritarian takeover through bureaucratic methods. When they exhaust this, you'll see them frustrated and declare states of emergencies. The founders wrote about this in the Federalist Papers, people like this have always existed.
- pbhjpbhj 1y ago
  "It's not a clustefuck" ... proceeds to describe a clusterfuck ... What was your intention here?
  - throwaway5752 1y ago
    A clusterfuck describes chaos and disorganization. This is just a deliberate attack, it is being executed well. It is just malicious.
    - postalrat 1y ago
      People will prefer calling it both malicious and disorganized. Well executed sounds too positive.
      - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
        Calling it well-executed is pragmatic. There's no reason to avoid positive-sounding things if they're true, especially not because it's positive. If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. -- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Related: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43935913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43935913

howmayiannoyyou 1y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shFUDPqVmTg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shFUDPqVmTg Sabine highlights the problem with scientific funding in this video and it should be required watching before posting on this thread. Reform is needed. Some good will be tossed with a lot of bad. Its a cycle, a pendulum, and it will eventually tip to excess again sometime in the future. For now... fixing what is broken ought to be the priority.

Onawa 1y ago
Counterpoint, please consider watching Professor Dave discuss the issues with Sabine's talking points. While there are certainly problems within science, Sabine has the most nihilistic view of the field. https://youtu.be/nJjPH3TQif0 https://youtu.be/nJjPH3TQif0
- ben_w 1y ago
  I think there may be a language issue here; to use her own words as best as I can remember them, excusing her bluntness under "perhaps I'm just German" — a messy kichen here in Germany would be described with the word "Chaos", and a mistake that a Brit would call "dropping the ball" would be described as "eine totale Shitshow". This doesn't render her immune to the lifecycle of physicists, of course: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556 https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556 and https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/ But that means I don't put too much credence to her summary of climate science or trans stuff: when it's the topic of inclusivity attempts, she's got the direct personal experience to play the "here's how well intentioned policies backfire" card; when it's the internal politics within science, honestly that reminds me a lot of software development's cycle of which language, framework, design pattern, and organisational orientation pattern (objects, composition, functional, etc.) is a code smell or the smell of coffee that one should wake up to, so it rings true even if I can't verify it.
- simpaticoder 1y ago
  >Sabine has the most nihilistic view of the field "The field" in her case is "particle physics". And she's been making a very good case against the non-science being done in that field. Unfortunately, like physicists tend to do, for some reason, she's branched out into criticizing "not her field" as well, sometimes even non-science topics, to far worse effect. She's become an excellent example of audience capture, a loss to us all (and a loss to credibility she earned within particle physics).

Onawa 1y ago

As a federal contractor within NIH, I can tell you that the damage has already been done to the United States' dominance in science. Even if every action taken by current administration is reversed, the uncertainty for foreign scientists is too much. Many that I have spoken to are looking for their exit from either gov or academic research, or looking to leave the United States completely. The Trump admins cuts are not likely to be reversed until at minimum 2029 if Democrats are able to take the White House. But the entire scientific pipeline has been disrupted. Science has always had "passion profession" tax, but at this point I would strongly recommend anyone pursuing life sciences or government research to either consider another field, or realize that you will most likely end up in industry. Things are quite bleak right now...

glitchc 1y ago
[flagged]
- maxfurman 1y ago
  You are aware that scientists have to eat and pay rent, right? A lack of funding in the US will draw scientists to places that do have funding. You're confusing "science in the US now" with "all science globally."
- miltonlost 1y ago
  In your "long-term" world view, apparently the lives of scientists in the here and now doesn't matter
- Facemelters 1y ago
  please refer to a chart of scientific progress that encompasses both those years and the post WWII expansion of the US science state
- eig 1y ago
  The parent commenter is not speaking about science as a whole, they are speaking about US dominance in science. You state that "hiccup won't stop or even slow down science in the US. All it will do is take government out of the equation." I disagree and I would suspect most scientists reading that statement would also disagree. I too have seen many bright people turning away from the US because of this. I am personally certain that these policies will significantly slow down science in the US. After all, when David Hilbert was asked in 1934 "How is mathematics at Göttingen, now that it is free from the Jewish influence?", he replied “There is no mathematics in Göttingen, anymore”.

xqcgrek2 1y ago

[flagged]

gbanfalvi 1y ago
Agreed. Nepotism is the way forward.
Hikikomori 1y ago
[flagged]
- bitlax 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - Ar-Curunir 1y ago
    8 years ago. And also, much better than the stuff that goes viral on twitter today, like Kanye's latest Nazi song, along with defenses of people singing along to it.
    - bitlax 1y ago
      Sir, this is a Wendy's.
nailer 1y ago
I’m not sure why this is being voted down. The NSF did actively pursue DEI and the US government is obligated not to fund organizations that discriminate based on race.
- Ar-Curunir 1y ago
  The NSF only had “DEI” requirements (really just requiring grants to have a section on vague Broadening Participation guarantees) due to Congress-mandated laws.
- malcolmgreaves 1y ago

nickledave 1y ago

the tl;dr: > The NSF’s investments have shaped some of the most transformative technologies of our time—from GPS to the internet—and supported vital research in the social and behavioral sciences that helps the nation understand itself and evaluate its progress toward its democratic ideals. So in 2024, I was honored to be appointed to the National Science Board, which is charged under 42 U.S. Code § 1863 with establishing the policies of the Foundation and providing oversight of its mission. > But the meaning of oversight changed with the arrival of DOGE. That historical tension—between the promise of scientific freedom and the peril of political control—may now be resurfacing in troubling ways. Last month, when a National Science Board statement was released on occasion of the April 2025 resignation of Trump-appointed NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, it was done so without the participation or notice of all members of the Board. > Last week, as the Board held its 494th meeting, I listened to NSF staff say that DOGE had by fiat the authority to give thumbs up or down to grant applications which had been systematically vetted by layers of subject matter experts. > Our closed-to-the-public deliberations were observed by Zachary Terrell from the DOGE team. Through his Zoom screen, Terrell showed more interest in his water bottle and his cuticles than in the discussion. According to Nature Terrell, listed as a "consultant" in the NSF directory, had accessed the NSF awards system to block the dispersal of approved grants. The message I received was that the National Science Board had a role to play in name only. I can't sum up everything that's wrong with this moment better than that. This is not some necessary pain that comes with shaking up the system. This is a hostile takeover of the federal government by embarrassingly ignorant goons who think they know everything, just because they can vibe code an almost functional app. This is what happens when you have VCs huffing their own farts in their Signal echo chamber: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t.... Congratulations, you buffoons, you have demonstrated there are scaling laws for footguns.

blackhaj7 1y ago
"This is what happens when you have VCs huffing their own farts in their Signal echo chamber" Superb, take a bow!
conn10mfan 1y ago
that semaphore article is pretty interesting, there is a whole body of work being developed by folks like Gil Duran, Naomi Klein, Emil Torres, etc. right now diving into the Tech Right and characters like Andreessen one thing I'm struck by is the willingness of people who greatly benefitted from the downstream effects of basic research (ex: the entire internet economy being downstream of DARPA, CERN, etc.) to tear down basic research, to .... unleash science? take Peter Thiel for instance, across Youtube, blogs, and articles you can hear him railing against science and how it's stuck in the 70s...there almost seems to be this Silicon Valley disdain for science & scientific research and I'd love to understand why engineer/innovator characters are so antagonistic to researchers Thiel on Science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbk5Lccr_e0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbk5Lccr_e0 (aside: there is a strong chance these characters are hyper interested in race science, eugenics, and gene modification and they are simply upset about ethics which they euphemistically refer to as "dogmatism")

User23 1y ago

Scientists commit to politics. Election happens. Election has consequences. Shocker. To be fair conservatives warned about this for decades but nobody listened. The only possible response to this propaganda piece are nodding along religiously or revulsion and disgust at the sheer intellectual dishonesty of it. This kind of superficial performative nonsense is a big part of why the replication crisis is as bad as it is. And few scientists are willing to speak of that. I’d love to hear from the scientists whose careers were damaged or destroyed by this person. But I doubt I ever will.

AlexandrB 1y ago
It's pretty depressing watching comments here that say anything other than "this is the worst thing ever" or "this is fascism" get downvoted/flagged into oblivion.
- LexiMax 1y ago
  Any social media site that delegates moderation responsibilities to its users will eventually run into these sorts of problems. At a certain scale, you're almost guaranteed to get moderation via populism simply because the friction for using these tools in bad faith is far too low and there never seems to be enough of a punishment for misuse. Shockingly, I've found Hacker News to be far worse about how it promotes echo chamber behavior than most subreddits, despite how much tougher it is to obtain access to these tools. On the other hand, it's far less of a problem on Tildes, and I suspect that's in large part due to there simply not being a explicit downvote button. However, the fact that "Noisy" and "Spam" tags haven't been abused might simply due to its smaller scale. To be clear, I actually agree with the people downvoting you, despite not doing so myself. But if you find that distasteful, don't hate the player, hate the game.
anigbrowl 1y ago
scientists whose careers were damaged or destroyed by this person Please provide some examples of how you think this person destroyed anyone's career.
UncleMeat 1y ago

gitroom 1y ago

Damn, none of this feels new to me - just feels like every few years it's some other mess hurting science. You ever think this stuff ever really gets fixed or we just keep going in circles forever?

deleted 1y ago

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kundejenny 1y ago

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kundejenny 1y ago

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