wins32767

I didn't ever argue getting rid of them. I said staff them with people with industry experience who can move back and forth between industry and government. Even a well paid regulator who has never done the thing they are regulating is going to make stupid decisions.

I also want a robust regulatory standard with teeth. But I want it written and enforced by highly skilled people who have some actual experience with doing the thing that's regulated.

And in many fields the pay gap between government and private industry is such that you won't get good people to work for the government if that means they can never again work for private industry.

SOC2, a standard governed by the a CPA certification body, costs billions of dollars a year to collectively implement and doesn't meaningfully improve security. FDA auditors trying to regulate software development for clinical trial data capture makes clinical trial software cost ~30% more AND makes it lower quality. There are costs on both sides of the continuum. The costs for bad regulators are just diffuse.

That's not an inherently bad practice. I'd much rather there be two way flow between industry and government than have people who have never tried to run a business doing regulation or those who have never worked in government trying to comply with regulations. Strong ethics rules and culture is the way you manage the downside, not bans.

How do you think they're going to transmit the sunlight to Europe?

Its almost like not having meaningful power projection capabilities when you rely on imports for essential industries is not good!

It's not propaganda, it's all the normal people on the left in my life who have in the last 5-6 years started calling anyone to their right on social justice issues racist. You're doing a lesser form of it here with "Clearly, nakedly something that anyone with a decent moral compass..." That makes a moral issue out of something that's clearly within the realm of politics in a healthy society (where to direct tax dollars). It's perfectly reasonable to think that I'd rather have slightly higher dollars spent on Medicaid funding than do that research study. If you agree with that, then it's clearly a political question, not a moral one.

Part of the issue here is that the academy has lost the trust of Republicans. So even if there are results that institutional racism is a significant factor, if it's coming from someone who is "woke" in their views it'll just be dismissed. To them it feels like using their tax dollars to fund someone who is going to skew results so they have a club to beat them with. And a big part of the reason they've lost trust is that the academy doesn't acknowledge when it's being political (see "reality has a liberal bias" in this thread or your frame here, for that matter).

How about a reframe: When they are the ones in power, cutting funding to organizations that support their political opponents and goals they don't support.

I'll be the first to say this is a bad thing AND that they're going about it stupidly. But I'm also saying that this is an inevitable consequence of the failure to manage your stakeholders over a period of decades.

Do you have any idea how smug this sounds to about half the people that need to pay for the scientific funding? I'm not a Republican, but even I'm turned off by this sort of attitude.

I'm not implying I'm stating that if you depending on the tax base of the entire country to pay your bills you need to ensure that you cultivate the support of both parties.

Like this from the article:

> When Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDKD), first got to the NIH 12 years ago, she wanted to increase research into the social determinants of health—structural racism in home-loan practices meant that nonwhite people got iced out of home ownership and generational wealth, which forced them to live in neighborhoods closer to toxic sites such as factories and highways, without sidewalks and amenities. “It’s a challenging field to quantify, but we’re getting to a place in science where we can start asking these questions,” Norton says. Now the topic is verboten in U.S. grants. “That whole line of research has been shut off and censored because some people find the words ‘structural racism’ offensive.”

If you're a Republican, why should you want to fund people who dump on your view of the world with your taxes? Why do scientists feel free to talk this way about half the people who pay their salaries? It's just dumb to act politically and then get mad when people on the other side treat you as a political actor.

My last gig was at a startup that worked on SDoH issues for people on Medicaid and you know what we did when the administration changed? We started emphasizing values that would resonate with the new funders and dropped the SDoH framing. Still helping the same people, doing the same work, just talking about it in their language. It makes me think a lot of people aren't in this to do good science or help people who need it, but want their team to win more than they want good outcomes.

That's foolish. There is certainly an amount of money on funding research that is unreasonable! Determining where that line should rest is an inherently political question. Determining who should get funding for that is also a political question. The latter question was able to be papered over for many years because the scientific community generally contained roughly equal members of both parties. Since that isn't true any longer now "science" is getting treated like interest group just like all the other groups within the country. It's definitely going to hurt the country in the long run, but acting like this wasn't going to happen eventually when the university system purged itself of moderates and conservatives is foolish and obscures the part of the problem that came from the universities themselves.

The logical end state of this belief is a civil war. I assume that in lieu of trying to change minds you're buying guns and ammo and trying to organize like minded people into a militia to protect your safety? Cause if not, I don't really think you really believe that a significant fraction of the country wants people like you dead.

The largest single payer in the US is the Federal government. Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare, the VA... The problem won't be fixed for the vast majority of expenditures because the government will need to perform the same function the FDA is now for it's drug costs.