3 ms·
The scarier part is that a lot of people will see this as good news.
by BrenBarn 9mo ago
The scarier part is that a lot of people will see this as good news.
- TacoCommander 9mo agoThere's a good chance they'd have been put to use strengthening the advertisement-dopamine-corporate control cycle that humanity is currently suffering under.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- zerof1l 9mo agoWhy? If they instead move to EU, that's a win for EU.
- ixtli 9mo ago[flagged]
- Sharlin 9mo agoGP’s point is that because being anti-science is on the rise.
- hsuduebc2 9mo agoIt is good for EU but I belive he was pointing to these hurr durr emigrants bad people. Usually the same people which conveniently always forget that they probalby come as much poorer people than these ones.
- SJC_Hacker 9mo agoScientists tell people things they don't want to hear
- groundzeros2015 9mo agoThat’s an odd description
- jandrese 9mo agoDepends if your career depends on some facts not being true. Scientists can seem like a threat to you specifically if for example you need Climate Change to not be real. The last thing you would want is someone bringing evidence and analysis to that reality.
- groundzeros2015 9mo ago> for example you need Climate Change to not be real Isn’t this the consensus of the major world powers? Is that what these lost PhD students were studying?
- ryoshoe 9mo agoMajor world powers generally agree on the reality of climate change, the disagreement is on how to address it
- Braxton1980 9mo agoYou know he means some US citizens who are anti- intellectual due to a combination of insecurities and propaganda by the Republican party
- esalman 9mo agoBecause academia and University research is broken at best and leftist breeding ground at worst /s
- ActorNightly 9mo agoEU unfortunately doesn't have the economic investment in education like US for a lot to justify the move.
- ixtli 9mo agoI came here to see if the comments could explain to my why this obviously bad thing is actually good. Its somewhat comforting to see others worried about the implication. The fact is that governments (aka public funding) is really what drives the biggest most impactful sorts of scientific breakthroughs. Think: NASA spinoffs, the internet, rocketry, MRNA, etc. I know that the US has been failing to fund important things like Fusion for more than 40 years now but its sad and scary to see it halting.
- ccheney 9mo agoIs it not a good thing that these folks could do something more productive in the private sector? Just on your Fusion example alone: https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/31/every-fusion-startup-that-has-raised-over-100m/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/31/every-fusion-startup-that-... Wouldn't it be better if companies like these had a larger pool of PhDs to pull from? Private sector does some things better, see Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, SpaceX, et al. This _is_ a good thing.
- ausbah 9mo agociting rocket companies feels funny when most of the research and some non-trivial % of contracts comes (came?) from gov’t (mostly defense) spending
- Sharlin 9mo agoIncredible false dichotomy. I don’t even know where to start dissecting this "argument".
- kaitai 9mo agoYour phrasing "something more productive in the private sector" is taken from the DOGE emails to federal employees. Note that in this sense "productive" means "makes money for corporations". If your utility function is different, these jobs are no longer more productive. For a very concrete illustration, I know a Veterans Administration physician who got the DOGE emails. He's been underpaid by $50k-100k per year compared to private market rates, for the last twenty years. He is happy to take that discount because the mission of caring for veterans is something he cares about, and because he feels he can practice better medicine if his goal is patient outcomes rather than billable procedures. He also values the education and research priorities of the VA. It is absolutely true that he would make a lot more money for a private provider maximizing procedures and billing. But is that what we should be optimizing for as a society? Is that what you personally aim for from your doctors?