Posted by chmaynard 10/13/2025
The author asks the question, but then never answers it. That isn't surprising -- nearly no one outside science understands how it works.
* Science rejects authority and doubts expertise. The greatest amount of scientific eminence is trumped by the smallest amount of scientific evidence.
* The basic scientific posture is that a theory is assumed to be false until proven true.
* Contrast this outlook with pseudoscience, where a theory is assumed to be true until proven false.
* A conscientious scientist lists all the reasons his theory might be wrong. In other fields, this task is left to critics.
This summary may seem to be at odds with modern scientific practice, but that's because much of modern scientific publishing is not science, it's marketing.
In a now-famous science story, during an astronomy conference a researcher stood up and confessed that he had made a mistake -- his detection of an exoplanet actually resulted from a failure to subtract Earth's own annual motion from his data.
The audience came to its feet and gave the researcher a standing ovation.
That is science.
If that’s true (maybe it’s not? all I have is vibes!), if it is indeed true, and science is becoming less able to convert into invention- it stands to reason that at some point it becomes rational for a country to direct resources elsewhere. Political will becomes strained, and politicians decide it’ll be popular to defund and discourage science.
And maybe that is how the US got here.
There are some major advancements in biotech for instance that are nothing to sneeze at, and even more in the pipeline (which admittedly may not pan out). Organs may not qualify as an invention technically, but being able to manufacture them certainly does. Not to mention how environmental tech is needed now more than ever.
Science being less convertible to inventions could have counterintuitive effects if it were true. Like smaller nations being in a 'don't even bother' situation while superpowers gain a literal monopoly on invention due to the rareness raising the barrier to entry to get anything meaningful out of it.
Politicians defunding and discouraging science is based more around memes and suppressing dissent than anything concrete. The reason not to create such 'stability' is generally that when the rest of the world passes by it will not be kind to you. But even if science somehow became literally useless tomorrow (an impossibility, of course), I highly doubt that politicians would not be such rigorous cost-oriented stewards that they would consider it worth the political capital to uproot the entrenched bureaucracies which no longer serve a purpose. Even if they knew it for certain was useless they might consider the spending a worthy price to pay for false hope. Crowds get real ugly when you tell them that things will never get better.
People's ideas about how humans should live together can be beneficial for the wealth and well-being of whole societies and its members. Was Rousseau part of basic or applied science?
We can wonder about how useful certain efforts are, of course, especially in all their extent; but I don't know how wise it is to dismiss things _wholesale_, just because their application is not immediately apparent and the rejection fits into the political current. The unnecessary snark is just sad to see here.
This one is easy - neither. The term "science" has gone through semantic dilution in a manner similar to how everyone is now an engineer - software engineer, prompt engineer, sanitation engineer.
Falsifiability is one of the key distinguishing characteristics of a proper science, as famously propounded by Karl Popper.
"Gender identities" not only can not be falsified, they should not be falsified, because that would amount to transphobia; denying the existence of someone's felt and lived gender identity is the definition of transphobia.
Since they cannot be falsified, nor even directly observed, measured, nor quantified, they are not scientific notions.
The closest most well-studied analogue to the "gender identity" is the legacy religious notion of "the soul," to which you will see you can ascribe most, if not all, of the same attributes as ascribed to the "gender identity."
[0] https://news.sky.com/story/fresh-trans-prisoner-row-as-girls...
I dunno, but how many % of research in terms of money and effort do you think is spent on that? 0,0001 % ?
It depends, this could be medicine or it could be sociology or it could be psychology, there's a few different places it pops up.
> feminist queer dance theory studies
This is very obviously performing arts or maybe something in English or Social Studies if the "dance" part is the specialization rather than the core. I doubt even the most died-in-the-wool woke-fessor or whatever would call it "science," which makes it pretty irrelevant to the current conversation, though just because something isn't STEM doesn't mean it's not important (though it might be significantly less lucrative).
I've seen similar articles about trade & the UK (and now the US). I'm sure someone has done or is working on similar analysis for science & engineering.
More science will happen with less government funding (see crowding out effect). This is why it's important to look not just at the intention of a policy, but at the actual outcome.
This author has the tail wagging the dog. I'd rephrase it... more startups, more science.