Another splendid article from one of America's most serious, balanced, and precise social critics. Mac Donald's empirical bent shown in her provision of evidence is one of the foundations of her sound expositions.

i just skimmed Ms. Krylov's article, and the analog which occurred to me is that of parasites. proliferating bureaucracies, almost like a jobs program for administrators who are paid to deal with the consequences of ever more legal and procedural requirements, ultimately reducing the amount of funds available to do the actual research. every step she describes involves money for administrators, website platforms multiply, subscriptions to them required.

it has been a newsworthy topic for years now, that large portions of the research being done produce results that cannot be duplicated in the peer review process, but the gravy keeps flowing. off the top of my head, somewhere around 50% of the cancer studies funded have produced unrepeatable results. if this is not cause for concern, what is? those of us who have been associated with university level teaching know that there is a "you scratch my back" mentality in funding, peer review, intra-university awards etc.

The NSF does not fund research that is funded by the NIH. So none of the cancer research was funded by the NSF. The lack of reproducibility in the soical and pyschological sciences is also well known and sadly NSF does fund that. As Ms. McDonald points out that directorate should have taken a bigger hit.

Peer review happens before a study is published. Failure to replicate the study happens after the study is published.

Both before and after is best. Journals in my field (cognitive psychology) increasingly often require replications of results within a given paper. I think this is good policy in the many cases where it's possible.

Why do you think it is so difficult to do this in the medical and social sciences? What does it mean?

i suspect that job security is foremost. i also just remembered an article in The Economist from about 2008 in which it was reported that drug companies and academics systematically avoid publishing any negative results, such as side effects, in clinical trails, while publishing all the positive results. looks like "follow the money" any way you cut it.

Maybe the systems are simply extremely complicated. It took decades and many different studies to converge on what seems to be an answer to what is really the most healthy blood pressure. Maybe there is not a scandal there just difficult statistical work.

By comparison, Alzheimer's or psychiatric diseases are surely a nightmare.

BIG SCIENCE
- has abandoned the scientific method
- instead has turned to a money grab

Dr_P, my foot... The grants for individuals from the NSF barely even pay for two-weeks of summer salary, and many forgo event that. Either you are troll or an ignoramus. But either way, (it does not matter) your "epistemic violence" will not stand. Fund the biologists, chemists, physicists and engineers!

Fund them yourself
- if you don’t want strings

I suggest you check out LIGO the great pioneering gravitational wave telescope.

I suggest you look at ALL the output

Can you tell me one area of thecore areas of physics, chemistry, math, and molecular biology that are a money grab?

Hint
- Go look at the titles of the grants

That really reveals you as ignorant.

Social, Behavioral and Economics sciences are NOT science!! They are Pseudoscience. A core tenet of Scientism. They are soft "sciences" that begin and end in the eye of the beholder. They use the processes of science to give pseudoscience the aire of science, implication of legitimacy. But they are ALWAYS falsifiable beyond broad observations. Soft science that isn't hard science like physics, math, engineering, chemistry, etc.

The most meaningful thing that can be done with respect to the NSF is to delegitimize the Pseudosciences masquerading as Science. Classify them as any belief system that is grounded only in the faith of believers in them. Many other things they can be known as. But Social, Behavioral and Economics are the furthest thing from real science. That under the patina of science have been wielded as The Science that must be followed. Science that assumes, shape-shifts into whatever beliefs and values of those presenting them as authoritative with the same evidence that real, hard sciences imply. Pseudoscience has ZERO business being recognized as, funded by the national science budget.

Heather Mac Donald's article is excellent. She had exposed the astonishing amounts of NSF funding that has been spent on diversity, equity and inclusion instead of science. The NSF diktats for DEI are not just in the division of education, EVERY grant - even if it is for string theory - must have a plan for broader impacts and inclusion of minorities somehow in the work plan.

Imagine for example being a young researcher in string theory research, trying to devise a plan to teach inner city youth about math and science in some new and creative way? This is a task for which you are unprepared by your education and in which you may not be interested as it is a distraction from your research. Nonetheless, you must do it. Your science will not win you the grant, but the broader impacts plan will, that is backwards.

The stress this has placed on academic scientists has been more than burdensome. It takes away from their core interest, forces them to do activities for which they are not experts, and it costs money in what is an already small grant budget. It would have made more sense for all this kind of work to have been done by the Department of Education than by the NSF. So this correction, if it can be sustained, by no means a foregone conclusion, (it will require eight more years beyond Trump of conservative government for these changes not to be reversed) is a positive and good. Let scientists do science, don't try to make them into social justice warriors.

The negative and the bad are also covered by Ms. MacDonald. Cutting the funding to the budgets of the physical and life sciences is a huge mistake. The US has led in these disciplines for decades and the pace of discovery has been extraordinary, especially, in biology. Fifty years ago, biology was still a largely descriptive science, and then there was an explosion in findings and discoveries, such as PCR. Everything changed as a result. Today biology is quantitative, physical and synthetic. The revolution in the field has been magnificent.

At present, speaking honestly, fundamental physics, especially string theory, seems to be making slow progress, but we have to be in the field. There are very few people who can do this kind of work and the funding for their research, in the grand scheme of things, is budget dust. Chemistry, as always, is thriving, even as it has broadened to include biological chemistry and materials sciences. It makes no sense at all to cut any of this research. Lastly, the mathematical science are so inexpensive to support that it is not worth talking about the cost. We should fund mathematics anywhere good pure or applied research is being done. To not do so, is again not just foolish but dangerous. Terrence Tao should get special dispensation from the UCLA cuts, immediately.

I really wish that I could get this comment through to Michael Kratsios, he should know better, and I suspect that he does. But it takes courage to be the nail that sticks up because that is the nail that gets the hammer.

Cutting the funding to the budgets of the physical and life sciences is a huge mistake.

Like Hamas, the NSF can end this conflict in a single day.

The massive cutting of basic, curiosity-driven science will probably go down as one of Trump's biggest policy blunders. The only partial solution I can think of is for more conservative and Republican scientists to start raising their voices and running for office.

Here is a seminar talk given by Dr. James Holly, Jr.:
On Anti-Blackness in Engineering Education: How White Professors are Spirit-Murdering Black Students

https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/Research/Seminars/20210916

”Black Americans have a lineage of excellence in engineering that pre-dates our American chattel slavery, yet this legacy of ingenuity is suppressed within engineering education in the United States. Even as institutions and organizations within the engineering education community promote campaigns to take action against racism, the violence of whiteness remains unacknowledged.
The insidious construct of whiteness is treated casually and theoretically, while the destruction its causes is tangible and longstanding. This presentation will center on a work in progress that examines the concept of spirit-murdering within the context of an engineering education doctoral research program.”
Here’s a video of the talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1o5pagGT9k

There’s a fun video clip tacked on to the last 2 minutes of the YouTube video in which a black woman tells us she’s a queen, even though she says we don’t know what that means. Professor Holly apparently thought that listening to a belligerent black woman saying she’s a queen would reinforce whatever message he was trying to convey to his audience.
Professor Holly’s Purdue PhD dissertation is here:
Of The Coming Of James”: A Critical Autoethnography On Teaching Engineering To Black Boys As A Black Man
https://hammer.purdue.edu/articles/thesis/_Of_The_Coming_Of_James_A_Critical_Autoethnography_On_Teaching_Engineering_To_Black_Boys_As_A_Black_Man/7495913?file=13890041

The preface is autobiographical, and describes for example how he almost flunked out of the masters program in mechanical engineering at Michigan State University. He was traumatized by his time at MSU, and he decided he had zero interest in working as an engineer. Instead he decided to convince black boys that they should study engineering.

"I love the poorly-educated!"
-- DJTrump.

“The American people deserve a scientific enterprise free from political interference,” California Democrat Zoe Lofgren.

Breathtaking statement - 'free from political interference' is precisely WHY the gubbmint should NOT be funding it. And it presumes the democrats were leaving it 'free' from political interference. The lack of self-awareness is amazing....

Is Trump the Lord of the Flies?

Is Trump going to take on the misguided and deadly science of weather modification ? He did a good start years ago when he admitted he had seen where a hurricane was designed to land in the US, and thus forced the weather modification practitioners to hurriedly change the location.

Much of NSF funding is by private donations anyway.

Where the heck did you get that from? It is blatantly false. The NSF is not a philanthropic foundation. There is zero philanthropy involved. It is a government agency pure and simple. It is unbelievable what utter nonsense people will post here.

”The following features of the Holly abstract were standard. It ignores blacks’ on average rock-bottom mathematical skills. It is this skills gap that causes black underrepresentation in engineering, not “Whiteness,” a “culture of racism,” or “epistemic violence.” (The number of black 12th-graders who are advanced in math nationwide is a statistical zero; 60 percent of black 12th-graders do not possess even basic 12th-grade math skills. The average black score on the math SAT in 2023 was 440 on an 800-point scale, compared with Asians’ average 629 math score.)”

There’s a link in this passage, and if you click on it, you find that in 2019 7% of black 12th graders and 32% of white 12th graders were “at or above NAEP Proficient”.

Crémieux
@cremieuxrecueil:
In 2002, the inimitable La Griffe du Lion coined the Fundamental Law of Sociology:

"On large-scale tests of reasoning ability, the observed mean difference between non-Hispanic whites and African Americans is 1.1 ± 0.2 standard deviation."

Here we have an opportunity to check this Fundamental Law.

Assuming actual math proficiency within races follows normal curves, the cut-off for “Proficient” would be 1.475 SD above the black mean and 0.465 SD above the white mean. for a difference of 1.01 SD, in good agreement with the Fundamental Law of Sociology.

Here’s another check on the Fundamental Law.

In 2019, 66% of black 12th graders were “Below NAEP Basic”, and 29% of white 12th graders were “Below NAEP Basic”.

Again assuming that actual math proficiency within races follows normal curves, the cut-off for “NAEP Basic” would be +0.43 SD above the black mean and 0.55 SD below the white mean, for a difference of 0,98 SD between means, again in good agreement with the Fundamental Law.

Note: I’m assuming that the black SD equals the white SD.

The NSF needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

But you will have idiots do it.

The moment I see a program labeled "education" or an advanced degree in "education" I cringe; the program or the degree holder is the opposite of "education". Danny Kaye's "Vessel with the Pestal" from the "Court Jester" is a model of erudition compared to Mr. Holly's abstract.

Resent your lost years in school?

Having three degrees and having taught at the secondary and university level I didn't lose anything.

There's almost an element of hostage-taking at work here with the NSF.

NSF: "Leave us alone or Terrance Tao gets hurt!"

Is it Day One yet?
I need groceries!

Is there nothing Republicans won't do to cheat and lie and send armed thugs to kidnap people off the streets.
If I see it I will engage, to my eventual dismay.
But I will not live in a Fascist state.

One of the reasons I voted for Trump was because he promised to snatch illegal aliens off the streets, throw them into unmarked vehicles to make it harder for people like you to help them, and then forcibly remove them from my country.

Those "kidnapped" are felons who have broken the law, check 8 USC for details, jumping the border is a crime as is aiding those who do so. Also, I suggest Denis Mack Smith's bio of Mussolini if you want to understand what a "Fascist state" is, which in this case resembled the Biden administration.

Nope.
Biden did not have hundreds of masked and armed thugs to terrorize citizens.
Gulag Barbie already has concentration camps in which she likes to pose with her new fat lips and $50,000 Rolex.

Correct. Biden instead invited hundreds of thousands of armed thugs to enter our country illegally, the consequences of which our society has suffered tremendously and is stuck with dealing.

So enforcing 8 USC is thuggery? Biden allowed the US to be invaded and gave aid and comfort to them in violation of US law. It is not citizens who are "terrorized" but if illegal aliens are fearful so much the better.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out. But you don't have the balls to leave.

I just read that Trump has frozen $584 million at UCLA where Terence Tao works.

No wonder he is talking about splitting.

What a great move by Trump -- want to punish some extremists over anti-Semitism -- so naturally, drive out our top math and science people.

MAGA!

Tao works in harmonic analysis among other things mathematical. If his research is progressing well and shows promise of being commercially successful, I'm sure he'll get funding from Bill Gates or some other industrial leader. Elon Musk, perhaps.

Moronic comment. He is a mathematician. He could not care less about the applications of his work. He should not suffer the loss fo funding and we, the US, should do everything we can to keep him, happy, productive and fully ensconced. Do you remember what the outcome was of the German Nazis forcing Jewish physicists out of their universities? They came here and what events did we mark yesterday and will we mark on Saturday?

You played the Nazi card.

He is a mathematician. He could not care less about the applications of his work.

The taxpayers who have been funding him care.

Maybe he wants to be an academic.