Yay, politicians interfering in scientific funding is a thing again..

[kentonio]

You did, in the OP of this very thread.

Except I didn't.

[onodera]

reg must have been studying under Ben, like Luke Skywalker. I wonder who should be his Yoda.

[Sava]

No. reg is one of the Jedi twins (spawn of Leia and Han Solo).

hmmm, but would HC or reg be the girl?

they both are the girl

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

It's really depressing how many people hold the downright autocratic view that federal bureaucracy should just be left to its own devices without any oversight from elected officials.

Read up about NASA since the early 70s and get back to us on that, kthanx.

Oversight is fine, but that's not what Congress concerns itself with, it being a dirty pork barrel system.

[Sava]

Oh I get it....

reg, being the authoritarian he is, legitimately found the amount of people (zero) who "hold the downright autocratic view that federal bureaucracy should just be left to its own devices without any oversight from elected officials" to be depressing.

I originally read it as sarcasm.

[molly bloom]

I understood it was cheap and crappy care, ..

My elective cholecystectomy and follow up care says not. My stay at the local hospital included a choice of halal/kosher/vegetarian/afro-caribbean and your usual euro fare, with intervals for tea and coffee served by the lovely and lissom Svetlana, with on-site restaurants for those seeking other fare.

I had 10 days stay to have my liver and jaundice monitored while a gallstone which was blocking my common bile duct was removed (sans cutting) and the nurses were all round FAB-U-LOUS, as were the attending physicians, who were zealous in explaining things and answering questions.

My gall bladder removal (6 months later) took only an overnight stay, but I still managed to fit in time to consume smoked salmon, seasonal greens and real strawberry mousse, with proper oatmeal porridge for breakfast (it was wintertime, after all).

My keyhole surgery went fine and I have a small incision scar just below the breastbone with two very faint marks near my groin.


Unfortunately, you are right- politicians of all parties can't resist tinkering with the N.H.S. - the internal market being one example.

[Hauldren Collider]

To anyone who thinks the way grants are handed out is much cherished, I have a bridge to sell you

The grant system is ****ing broken and everyone knows it. Even people who are in useless wasteful fields recognize this. Further, we have billions of dollars being shelled out every year for crank sciences like applied sociology and anthropology. It's astonishingly wasteful. My own university has whole departments that would get the ax, and rightly so, if this bill passed.

The NSF is out of control, and we've known this for decades. It originated when we were afraid of the Soviets during the space race beating us in science research. We threw money at literally everything in order to catch up to people who weren't ahead of us, and we just never stopped.

Don't be fooled by scientists screaming that the political process is getting involved. It already is. Talk to anyone who writes grant applications. It's 100% politics. This just inserts a measure of sanity.

[kentonio]

[Lorizael]

To anyone who thinks the way grants are handed out is much cherished, I have a bridge to sell you

The grant system is ****ing broken and everyone knows it. Even people who are in useless wasteful fields recognize this. Further, we have billions of dollars being shelled out every year for crank sciences like applied sociology and anthropology. It's astonishingly wasteful. My own university has whole departments that would get the ax, and rightly so, if this bill passed.

The NSF is out of control, and we've known this for decades. It originated when we were afraid of the Soviets during the space race beating us in science research. We threw money at literally everything in order to catch up to people who weren't ahead of us, and we just never stopped.

Don't be fooled by scientists screaming that the political process is getting involved. It already is. Talk to anyone who writes grant applications. It's 100% politics. This just inserts a measure of sanity.

Every scientist I've heard speak about the grant process basically paraphrases Churchill: "The grant system is the worst method of allocating funds to science, except for all the others."

[Hauldren Collider]

The real reason Democrats are upset about this bill is that the soft sciences are their pets because these fields, lacking the actual scientific discipline found in more mathematical fields like Physics or Chemistry or Biology, tend to be full of people somewhere left of Mau and their findings are unsurprisingly highly political. This feeds itself. Grants are given to researchers likely to find crap like "conservatives r bad, science says so!" It's really atrocious.

There's also a soft science brain drain. Because the soft sciences have a well-deserved reputation for lack of scientific rigor, and subsequent lack of accuracy, people who want to do research and are actually intelligent avoid these fields like the plague and find themselves in Physics or Computer Science or other fields where mathematics determines truth and falsity rather than dead reckoning. As a result, anyone who can actually add six and seven fails to find themselves in the soft sciences, which means that people in those fields tend to not understand statistics at all. They all end up using the same ridiculous hypothesis testing system but because they don't actually understand the statistics behind it, they tend to be wrong more than they are right. I wish I was exaggerating--I recently read that literally more than half of all sociology studies are not reproducible. It's a ****ing cesspool.

[Hauldren Collider]

Every scientist I've heard speak about the grant process basically paraphrases Churchill: "The grant system is the worst method of allocating funds to science, except for all the others."

I only hear that from the professors in the humanities school here. The ones in the CS school and the science school say that it's a goddamn tragedy and the nicest thing that can be said about it is that it isn't as bad as Europe. I don't know how it's done in Europe so I can't evaluate that but I don't care. We're wasting money in really obvious ways on science that doesn't deserve the name.

[Lorizael]

I only hear that from the professors in the humanities school here.

I hear it from physics professors.

[kentonio]

The real reason Democrats are upset about this bill is that the soft sciences are their pets because these fields, lacking the actual scientific discipline found in more mathematical fields like Physics or Chemistry or Biology, tend to be full of people somewhere left of Mau and their findings are unsurprisingly highly political. This feeds itself. Grants are given to researchers likely to find crap like "conservatives r bad, science says so!" It's really atrocious.

Now I know despite your endless attempts to appear as dumb as a bag of rocks, that somewhere in there you have an actual brain. Please take just 2 minutes to sit and think about how staggeringly stupid and idiotic it is to suggest that in a country of over 310 million people (all living, working and trying to peacefully co-exist), that there shouldn't be a branch of science looking into HOW people do all those things, and trying to discover new possible ways to ensure that they can do so as prosperously, peacefully and happily as possible.

Just think about how mindnumbingly ****ing complicated all those social interactions are, and ask yourself how much of a mindless idiot you'd have to be to suggest we just ignore it all rather than trying to learn from it.

[Hauldren Collider]

If any of those fields had produced a meaningful and valuable scientific discovery in the last 50 years I might be inclined to agree with you, but for the moment it's a cesspool of people who either don't know what they're doing and hence aren't doing science or people who know exactly what they are doing and know that it isn't science.

Certainly it would be valuable to improve our understanding of such areas. You're laboring under the misconception that funding them would actually improve such understanding.

[kentonio]

If any of those fields had produced a meaningful and valuable scientific discovery in the last 50 years I might be inclined to agree with you, but for the moment it's a cesspool of people who either don't know what they're doing and hence aren't doing science or people who know exactly what they are doing and know that it isn't science.

So you don't see the value in things like the Milgram experiment that taught us that the behaviour we see in events like the holocaust are actually something easily reproducible in any population? You don't think something like that might be a valuable or meaningful discovery?

Certainly it would be valuable to improve our understanding of such areas. You're laboring under the misconception that funding them would actually improve such understanding.

No, you're doing the bizarre hard right thing of saying that the best way to improve something is to destroy it.