> No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
We need another Bell Labs where people can experiment without immediate monetization. Look at the history of lasers and such. Took decades but now we have femto pulse lasers for Lasik and such.
Please unflag this post. Steve Blank is an extreme moderate in the sense that he is non-political. So is this post. It is laying out an uncomfortable truth that impacts hackers in the US and everywhere. The simple facts is, our startup culture is under attack by the current administration. Should this attack be successful, we will no longer have startups, because without scientific research from US universities, supported by public grants, we will no longer have round A/B/C. It's game over for YCombinator and hacker culture in the US. We will all need to move to China. Sound extreme? It's not.
Professionalization and high employee debt means that the employees will choose sel-prezervation over creative inquiry and truth seeking.
Carring on with this too blantly and over time, it seems self-undermining.
I'd guess Science died the day it was born as "Science". So being a Science superpower really means being a gatekeeping Science-containment Superpower.
Antiscience?
I think to certain people, this is viewed as a necessary trade-off to curb the political power and influence of the so-called "Professional Managerial Class" in the United States, due to fears that a version of James Burnham's prediction[1] would come true. When this discourse comes up on sites like Twitter, and people ask why we're doing it, supporters of these cuts ultimately lay the blame at the feet of two camps: Campus protesters and the response to COVID (Masking, vaccine mandates, etc). I think for some people, those things were so traumatic the entire system needed to be torn down. I think the former is mostly harmless and the latter was necessary, but the faction in power doesn't see things that way - and the dissolution of scientific power in the US is how they're going to feel secure again.
I think the trauma argument is spot on here. The pandemic exposed the tenuous nature of the system we all exist in and for many that was simply too much. It is a deeply disconcerting thing to really sit with the knowledge that we depend upon systems so complex that no single person can fix or manage or describe them and that small perturbations can cause damage that is visible to everyone.
When that was all laid bare during the pandemic the reaction was to demand that "we" take back the power to control the system. For some this meant quietly covering the system back up, for others it means tearing it down and rebuilding it.
Of course that isn't to excuse the system, or blame the trauma. Traumatic reactions to mass death, dislocation, and disruption are expected. The system is also very far from perfect. However typically rational and effective solutions don't come from responses like we're seeing.
There are plenty of real issues with higher education, but the attacks on research are using protests and other things as a fig leaf.
We've seen this movie before, when Germany destroyed the world's leading research university system in the name of control and ideology. Most people would not want to repeat that, while it seems some in power feel differently.
They have so much money they dont think anything can ever happen to them save for having their money taken away by some boogeyman. Everything else is a problem for the poors.
Does the book describe how there's a professional managerial class that took over higher education inflating its costs, degrading its services, undermining its ideals, watering down it's standards?
Colleges need to get back to their mission and ditch the sports, drinking, non-academic facilities. Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.
> Colleges need to get back to their mission and ditch the sports, drinking, non-academic facilities. Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.
Can you explain how cutting research funding achieve these goal? Especially since many of the schools most impacted by these cuts are very much not party or college sports schools.
And dare I add to your points - actually fail students when their standard of work is not good enough? There seems to be no repercussions regarding poor quality work in the current MBA/business management undergrad space (I only speak to these, as I familiar with them) with an attitude of (actively enabled by colleges) pass entitlement and grade inflation from the students.
> Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.
That's not really what the current Trump/GOP/Desantis policy, if you could call it that, is about.
It's about weaponizing funding to exert direct government control on what is taught and how it operates. Government approved speech only.
The current admin's letter to Harvard demanded governmenr direct control over department operation, course materials and teaching staff
They pitch this to thir base as revenge on "woke", because they've primed their base, the majority of whom have never attended college, or have not stepped foot on a campus in decades, to distrust educational institutions.
> the response to COVID (Masking, vaccine mandates, etc)
This is something which I find quite saddening. The ire seemed to be directed at "scientists". The funny/sad part happens whenever you try to concede and say - Lets concede that scientists were wrong. How was the handling from POTUS at that time? People start getting into whataboutism.
The most sad part is that they think POTUS is simultaneously responsible for Project Warp Speed and also that fast approval made the vaccine suspect.
> Researchers mustn’t be complacent. They must communicate the difference between eliminating ideologically objectionable programmes and undermining the entire research ecosystem.
This is a weird statement. Researchers -- everyone, really -- must communicate that eliminating whole areas of research because the current administration deems them "ideologically objectionable" is suicidal. What is this, a dictatorship?
Readit News
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
It's by design.
Aand of course this submission gets flagged.
Carring on with this too blantly and over time, it seems self-undermining.
I'd guess Science died the day it was born as "Science". So being a Science superpower really means being a gatekeeping Science-containment Superpower. Antiscience?
I think to certain people, this is viewed as a necessary trade-off to curb the political power and influence of the so-called "Professional Managerial Class" in the United States, due to fears that a version of James Burnham's prediction[1] would come true. When this discourse comes up on sites like Twitter, and people ask why we're doing it, supporters of these cuts ultimately lay the blame at the feet of two camps: Campus protesters and the response to COVID (Masking, vaccine mandates, etc). I think for some people, those things were so traumatic the entire system needed to be torn down. I think the former is mostly harmless and the latter was necessary, but the faction in power doesn't see things that way - and the dissolution of scientific power in the US is how they're going to feel secure again.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Managerial_Revolution
When that was all laid bare during the pandemic the reaction was to demand that "we" take back the power to control the system. For some this meant quietly covering the system back up, for others it means tearing it down and rebuilding it.
Of course that isn't to excuse the system, or blame the trauma. Traumatic reactions to mass death, dislocation, and disruption are expected. The system is also very far from perfect. However typically rational and effective solutions don't come from responses like we're seeing.
We've seen this movie before, when Germany destroyed the world's leading research university system in the name of control and ideology. Most people would not want to repeat that, while it seems some in power feel differently.
They have so much money they dont think anything can ever happen to them save for having their money taken away by some boogeyman. Everything else is a problem for the poors.
Colleges need to get back to their mission and ditch the sports, drinking, non-academic facilities. Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.
Can you explain how cutting research funding achieve these goal? Especially since many of the schools most impacted by these cuts are very much not party or college sports schools.
Those most impacted are R1 schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_...
That's not really what the current Trump/GOP/Desantis policy, if you could call it that, is about.
It's about weaponizing funding to exert direct government control on what is taught and how it operates. Government approved speech only.
The current admin's letter to Harvard demanded governmenr direct control over department operation, course materials and teaching staff
They pitch this to thir base as revenge on "woke", because they've primed their base, the majority of whom have never attended college, or have not stepped foot on a campus in decades, to distrust educational institutions.
It seems that this dude had a huge influence on the shape of our society.
This is a weird statement. Researchers -- everyone, really -- must communicate that eliminating whole areas of research because the current administration deems them "ideologically objectionable" is suicidal. What is this, a dictatorship?