[HN Gopher] Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all ...
___________________________________________________________________
Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for
social sciences
Author : zdw
Score : 221 points
Date : 2024-12-13 04:38 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| ggm wrote:
| There's a famous quote usually attributed to Churchill, which
| like all famous quotes is probably apocryphal. It's about
| somebody saying much the same regarding drafting poets and
| artists for the war effort.
|
| His response was "what's the point of fighting?" And even as
| apocrypha I think it gets to a point: if you stop doing social
| science (which isn't a science) then what do you do when people
| turn out to need social scientists? Aren't we interested in
| having a balanced, happy society?
|
| Sure, NZ is financially fucked. I get it. Cut down all the
| forests, sell the water, sell the land, sell the bees. Sell the
| lifestyle to Peter Theil.
|
| I like New Zealand. It's not perfect. Cutting social science
| won't make it better any more than cutting te reo will.
|
| "The flogging will continue until morale improves" also comes to
| mind.
|
| Helping the economy by cutting wages and living conditions? Is
| that what they want people to study?
|
| NZ has been broke for decades. They survive on the smell of an
| oily rag. This is selling the oily rag.
|
| (An Ozzie btw)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > social science (which isn't a science)
|
| This is literally true in the sense that social science isn't
| _a_ science because it encompasses numerous sciences, but it is
| not true if the intent to say "social science (which isn't
| science)".
|
| (Social sciences may often require hypothesis testing in
| statistically-controlled experiments or have other practical
| limitations on experimentations because they address phenomenon
| that cannot easily and/or ethically be experimented with as
| much freedom as one would want in a laboratory, but then those
| issues exist for some phyiscal and life sciences as well.
| ggm wrote:
| It's just memetic in many ways. The bar for statistical
| relevance is low across all fields hard and soft, it used to
| be you could parade Cyril Burt out but we're well beyond a
| point where he's different to any discipline, social or not.
|
| I should have resisted the temptation to repeat the slur.
|
| Demographics couldn't be more important in a world dominated
| by millions of refugees. Or, for example, we'll be arguing
| about vaccines forever and having people who study why that
| is, is important. I think social sciences should be funded
| properly.
|
| I think NZ will regret this, just like the UK lived to regret
| Thatcher de-funding Russian studies, only to fail to seize
| advantages in the end of the cold war: insufficient people
| with skills facing Russia.
|
| I'm a computer scientist (which isn't a science)
| drunkenmagician wrote:
| I'm a Kiwi, but living abroad now. I have mixed views on
| this announcement, I do agree with the basic sentiment that
| NZ is broke and has been for a long time. That means
| 'decisions' on public spending need to be in the national
| interest, for the current govt, that translates into
| 'fiscal interest'. That said, cutting "all" govt funding to
| social sciences is not the right call. I would have though
| that a smaller budget and stricter set of criteria for
| funding would have been a better approach. NZ has always
| had a 'fringe element' looking for funding for dubious
| research of limited value, but de-funding everything that
| is not of economic value feels like the wrong approach.
| sgt101 wrote:
| I just can't find any reference to Thatcher cutting Russia
| studies, it's quite a strange thing to imagine given that
| she presided over the peak of the cold war. Could you help?
| I know that Blair closed great chunks of the foreign office
| and that has seriously impacted the UK's ability to
| represent its interested abroad, but that's not just
| Russia.
|
| I find it hard to imagine what the UK could have done in
| terms of taking advantage at the end of the cold war. I
| mean maybe if we had all moved to Germany then we would
| have been well placed to get the benefits that those folks
| got. On the other hand we did, eventually, get to shut down
| the British Army of the Rhine which saved a lot of money,
| and a bunch of skilled labour from eastern europe migrated
| to the UK as well. What potential benefits from a Russian
| engagment could the UK have realised?
| ggm wrote:
| Possibly this was a slur against her made at the time but
| I was told this as a young student at uni in 79-82
| window.havw a read of https://www.epoch-
| magazine.com/post/the-rise-and-fall-of-sov... for
| context.
|
| During the initial rapprochement years British banking
| was nothing like as present in the Russian
| denationalisation and the emergence of the oligarch
| kleptocracy. The decision of the Russian elites to invest
| in London came much much later.
| naasking wrote:
| > (Social sciences may often require hypothesis testing in
| statistically-controlled experiments or have other practical
| limitations on experimentations because they address
| phenomenon that cannot easily and/or ethically be
| experimented with as much freedom as one would want in a
| laboratory
|
| Social sciences have deeply problematic methodologies and the
| IRB is a cancer that's no longer about ethics but
| gatekeeping.
| namdnay wrote:
| I guess this is itself a social science experiment, namely to
| see if there is a link between doing social science and having
| "a balanced, happy society" :)
| jl6 wrote:
| I wonder how much funding will be needed to observe the
| results?
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| > if you stop doing social science (which isn't a science) then
| what do you do when people turn out to need social scientists?
| Aren't we interested in having a balanced, happy society?
|
| The implicit claim that you're making is that state funded
| academic studies of social science are important for a
| balanced, happy society. But where's the evidence that this is
| the case? Someone could argue (and at times have) that the
| state should fund religious institutions because they're
| necessary for a happy society. But some would counter that
| religion isn't necessary for a happy society, while others
| might counter that religion is important for a happy society
| but that it's unnecessary for the state to support it.
|
| If we're making the claim that these things should be funded by
| the state, and that they're important for a happy society, then
| those claims should be backed up by some fairly strong
| evidence.
| camillomiller wrote:
| I'm absolutely not for these cuts, and I believe that social
| sciences are important. Nonetheless, the politicization and
| radicalization of social sciences in the last 15 years is
| undeniably problematic, and plays a role in the balcanization
| of society. Academic detachment from reality is a problem
| even smart academics can joke about, as they know it is
| somewhat of a true trope. The ones that certainly laugh about
| that the least are a lot of social scientists, in my
| experience. They are also often very far from considering the
| complexity of economics in their fields of studies, and
| that's also an issue. Sprinkle some identity politics dust on
| it, and you have the perfect recipe for disaster, offering
| conservatives and anti-progressists your academic head on a
| silver platter. I believe that social sciences (yep, it's a
| generalization, I know...) have failed to play academic
| politics properly in the last two decades, mostly due to
| radicalization of ideas and topics.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| The irony is that it's the same non-academic organisations
| that are deciding those topics to get funded and who now
| are deciding to cut the funding.
|
| Academics have to apply for funding and one big criteria
| over the years has been it's "social impact".
|
| So there's three things. The politics of those in charge of
| funding. The change of academia to only allow research
| deemed socially useful (utilitarianism). And the third is
| the co-adoption of researchers themselves.
|
| As politics change the response should be to change the
| criteria and agenda of funding to make it less radical not
| to cut the funding.
|
| Furthermore these organisations have, over the years
| enlarged and entrenched themselves. This is why millions
| are spent on thousands of people to monitor DEI of the
| academics.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Implicit in the request for research with social impact
| was that it should be positive social impact, as
| perceived by most people not just one partisan wing.
|
| _> As politics change the response should be to change
| the criteria and agenda of funding to make it less
| radical_
|
| If it were that easy it'd have been done already. You
| can't tell radical activists to just be reasonable.
| gilleain wrote:
| Not particularly important, but it is 'balkanization' with
| a k.
| demarq wrote:
| So how do you get that evidence?
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| Shouldn't this be asked of someone making the claim, and
| not of someone who says that the claims should be backed up
| by evidence? If someone claims that Apple cider vinegar
| cures cancer, they should be the ones providing the
| evidence. You shouldn't be asking people who didn't make
| the claim how to find evidence for it.
|
| Though after decades of funding the social sciences I would
| have hoped that someone would have looked into whether or
| not they're actually accomplishing anything. If not, it
| would speak volumes.
| ashwoods wrote:
| I think you didn't get the question. If we were to seek
| that evidence, who would turn to?
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Economist! /s
| notxpert14827 wrote:
| I think you're missing their very good point. "Social
| science" is how you get the evidence.
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| As I mentioned previously, if after decades of funding
| social science we don't have an answer to that, then it's
| simply incorrect to claim that continuing to fund social
| science is going to give us an answer.
|
| If you want to argue that we should put into funding a
| specific project to look into the benefits of social
| science, you can do that.
|
| But saying that we should do widespread funding of a
| discipline in order to find out if a discipline is
| actually worth it, and then after decades of doing
| widespread funding of that discipline you say "well, I
| don't have any evidence that it's worth it, because you
| have to keep finding it to find the evidence," is, to be
| frank, bizarre.
|
| Imagine if we did this for other fields. We putting
| funding into homeopathy for decades. Someone comes along
| and makes the claim that we need to continue doing this,
| in order for society to be healthy. Someone asks what the
| evidence for this is, and the reply is "we have to keep
| funding homeopathy to get the evidence!"
| notxpert14827 wrote:
| There are many questions we may want to ask about
| society. For example, "Does funding social sciences make
| a society happier?" is one of them. Social sciences give
| us the general capability to ask those questions and
| understand the answers. Whether you see value in that is
| of course up to you.
|
| (I never said, claimed or argued any of the things you
| mention in your reply, so I'm not addressing those
| points)
| hebocon wrote:
| I think you're both still talking past one another.
|
| > Social sciences give us the general capability to ask
| those questions and understand the answers.
|
| This is almost tautological depending on where those
| fields lie between physics and philosophy.
|
| Chemistry is just applied Physics. Biology is just
| applied Chemistry. Neurology is just applied biology.
|
| But psychology (and by extension, sociology) is firmly on
| the Philosophy side of the fence in my uneducated
| opinion.
| confidantlake wrote:
| Where is the evidence that social sciences give us the
| capability to ask those questions and understand those
| answers? I would argue that only I have that ability and
| instead you should direct that money towards me.
| benterix wrote:
| The difference being for homeopathy we actually do have
| the research priving it's a scam whereas for social
| studies we only have the research showing that some
| proiminet studies are a scam (or are unpreplicatable for
| other reasons). That's a far cry from "social studies are
| proved not to benefit society at all" and cutting all
| funding for them.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Well, we don't have studies proving it's a scam. We have
| papers that show that specific homeopathic remedies don't
| work. That doesn't disprove homeopathy in general. So -
| we should fund it until funding it is fully disproven
| from all angles?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Well, you could ignore the naysayers and divert hundreds of
| billions of dollars into funding a vast social science
| apparatus for decades, and then see if the results have
| clearly made people happier in ways that couldn't have been
| done without the state.
|
| Which is what has been done, and why NZ is defunding it.
| derbOac wrote:
| So, the problem with these types of arguments is the evidence
| is often obscured by shell games with labels, or ignoring the
| elephant in the room.
|
| My research sort of straddles statistics, epidemiology,
| neurogenetics, and social sciences, and my impression is
| there's a great deal of stuff that doesn't become interesting
| to people _until_ it involves social sciences. I say this
| from the perspective of someone who often wants the math and
| whatnot to be more appealing to people when it 's not.
|
| You can take some model, or method, or advance, and if it
| sits somewhere in a wetlab or physics building, no one cares.
| But if you make it about relationships, or money, or
| happiness, or children's social development, it becomes
| interesting.
|
| The value is so built into the fabric of these things we
| don't even recognize it half the time. It becomes another
| physics grant, or engineering grant, or medicine grant.
| They're social science in nature, but god forbid you call it
| that because it's seen as soft or irrelevant even though
| that's the thing people are actually most interested in.
| People don't give a damn about memory models in bare-metal
| programming, or electrical engineering, but they do care
| about being able to talk to their relatives on the other side
| of the globe.
|
| The other thing that always strikes me as odd about these
| discussions and decisions is we as people are, well social
| beings. So do you want to leave the study of our social
| behavior and experiences to ... what exactly? Religious
| theory? Astrology? What else is there than scientific study
| of psychosocial phenomena? Are you saying that social
| phenomena shouldn't be studied at all? That it should be
| studied _nonscientifically_?
|
| Within the social sciences there's a well-known phenomenon of
| people coming in from elsewhere and thinking they can solve
| all the problems because they're physicists, or chemists, or
| whatever, and that you can just slap whatever paradigm works
| in that to study psychological or socioeconomic phenomena.
| It's seen as naive, and it inevitably fails because it
| doesn't scale up to the population level, or doesn't address
| the difficulties of the real-world phenomenon as it is, or
| whatever.
|
| There's also the problem that some of the biggest
| contributions of social science aren't what people think they
| are. Modern meta-analysis and preregistered replication
| research both came from psychological research for example
| (meta-analysis from clinical and educational psychology), and
| I doubt people realize that. But it's widespread in
| biomedical research, and should probably be applied more
| widely in many other fields. In certain ways it's _more_
| scientifically rigorous than what happens in a lot of
| biophysical science. But it goes against the stereotype of
| what "psychosocial research" is.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| Stop arguing sense. They will find out in due time. All
| technological advance eventually come down to modifying
| human behavior, individually or collectively. When we de-
| priortize ways to study and better understand human
| behavior collectively, we are stealing from our long-run
| selves.
|
| All developed countries are struggling with fertility
| declines. If all you have are economists, they will suggest
| economic solutions (i.e. offer incentives, lower costs of
| parenthood). A sociologist will tell you that alone won't
| work, you need to create a culture where child-raising is
| the social norm and is cool. Ally that with economic
| incentives and maybe we stand a chance.
|
| But don't worry. Let's get rid of social sciences. My
| people have a saying "a person who is not knowledgeable
| about why a fence exists, should be wary of removing the
| fence"
|
| L
| jl6 wrote:
| > what do you do when people turn out to need social
| scientists?
|
| I'm usually supportive of fundamental research where there are
| no specific benefits known ahead of time, because the track
| record of fundamental research is pretty good in terms of
| eventual payoff - but some of the social sciences are
| definitely on the soft end of this, and the examples given in
| the article don't seem to make a strong case for being
| something NZ _needs_ , when considered alongside all the other
| things NZ needs.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| I strongly disagree.
|
| One of the examples mentioned studies population changes
| during NZ's colonization. It's part of Maori-led research.
| Such research provides a better understanding of the history
| and culture of the indigenous population of NZ. In turn, this
| research contributes towards contextualizing and enriching
| relationships between communities within the larger modern NZ
| society with respect to the economic and political plight of
| these groups.
|
| The overarching theme here is identity. Both on an individual
| level, as well as a community level. Our shared past,
| heritage, traditions, stories, relationships with others,...
| are all what make us "us". And social sciences are paramount
| within that never-ending debate.
|
| In a way, defunding research which studies particular
| indigenous communities within society is tantamount to
| effacing those communities from a larger national historical
| identity. However, doing so will never end that drive
| communities have to remember and to assert their own history
| and identity.
|
| That's why studying how the arrival of Europeans in New
| Zealand has had an demographic, political, economical,
| cultural effect on the indigenous population definitely is
| fundamental research. And an important one at that.
| jl6 wrote:
| Do you want to get social sciences defunded? Because this
| is how you get social sciences defunded. The academic
| obsession with identity is completely toxic.
| seydor wrote:
| We are at the age of engineering human behavior and societal
| engineering is in the realm of STEM. social science is like
| alchemy in an age where chemistry already exists
| jyounker wrote:
| Every time you interview a user or set up a survey to
| determine customer preferences, you're using techniques
| developed from social sciences.
| morkalork wrote:
| All the video games and online gambling trying to maximize
| micro transactions and revenue are too.
| blitzar wrote:
| Advertising ...
| dgfitz wrote:
| It is an interesting point.
|
| However, I can do these things without studying social
| science. Basically what you described is "talking to
| people" and "gathering information"
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Mostly you are doing statistics, which is math. Social
| science (when it is the good thing) also uses statistics to
| get answers to questions.
| jampekka wrote:
| > We are at the age of engineering human behavior and
| societal engineering is in the realm of STEM.
|
| We are definitely not. I'm saying that as someone researching
| how to use computational methods to model human behavior. We
| know very little about human behavior/mind/brain or society
| at that level.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| This has to be most arrogantly ignorant statement I have read
| in a long long long while. I just have to imagine this was
| sarcasm.
| oldpersonintx wrote:
| > what do you do when people turn out to need social
| scientists?
|
| avail yourself of the thousands still at work in other allied
| societies
|
| the world has more people at work pursuing pure academics than
| ever, and they are sharing their work
| jajko wrote:
| I don't get why NZ is 'fucked'. One of the richest people on
| the planet, with amazing nature, very, I mean absolutely
| terrific strategical location. Democracy. Big friends with US.
| I could go on for a long time.
|
| Is it 'fucked' in same way some folks from say Staten island or
| New Jersey say its fucked since they are not central Manhattan
| so everything else is subpar or wrong? I don't think rich
| people want to have their SHTF backup location in shithole, you
| have prettier cheaper places all over the world, yet folks want
| to go there.
|
| If you meant there are issues, sure they are everywhere, even
| in nordics or Switzerland. Not an interesting nor helpful
| position.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| "Senior" software engineer salary in NZ is maybe $120k NZD
| (about $70k USD), median house in Auckland or Wellington
| (which is where you need to be to earn even that much) is
| about a million NZD. Cost of living is very high.
|
| Maybe f*cked is hyperbole but if you don't already own
| property it is quite difficult to sustain a reasonable
| standard of living (let alone "get ahead") as a wage earner.
|
| I love NZ but it didn't make economic sense to stay.
| blitzar wrote:
| Sounds about the same as the UK ... but that is a median 1
| bed flat in London.
| tjpnz wrote:
| A million NZD plus however much you spend on fixing it up
| so it doesn't make you sick or kill you in an earthquake.
| And after that you're stuck working in a country which
| outside of a few very niche areas is a complete dead end
| where tech's concerned. I miss my family, but couldn't bear
| the thought of continuing my career there.
| pixelesque wrote:
| What on earth do you mean by: "One of the richest people on
| the planet"?
|
| National have started an "austerity" programme, tens of
| thousands of civil servants have been laid off, housing is
| disgustingly expensive (and the quality of it is awful as
| well), the price of goods and food is pretty expensive (even
| dairy products that are produced here are often more
| expensive than in Europe).
|
| The location's only great strategically if you ignore the
| (huge) future earthquake potential.
|
| Cities like Wellington have also had a chronic lack of
| infrastructure investment, so there are HUGE issues with
| water / sewage leaks - pretty much every week there's a new
| water main leaking somewhere in the city.
|
| (Have lived here for 10 years, and am looking to return to
| Europe - things are going downhill pretty fast here IMO).
| jajko wrote:
| You should travel a bit around the world, you would then
| understand how high NZ stands globally, I have trouble
| having sympathies with rich folks complaining that they
| can't buy central _houses_ in main capital city right out
| of pocket from first 2 years salary. Same situation all
| over the world.
|
| But that's the issue - people want paradise and absolute
| success on all fronts of existence, now, I mean right
| fucking now or they are losers. Its immature approach to
| life that will bring you tons of unhappiness and 0 of
| opposite, and it definitely won't help you move forward.
|
| Or - good luck with return to Europe. What you write is
| valid here too if you haven't noticed. Maybe not sewage but
| some other problem XYZ which is completely absent or non-
| issue in NZ.
|
| Be prepared half of folks will be either very welcoming of
| russian attack on Europe, subtle support of far far right
| all the way to xenophobia and racism. EU green deal is
| killing European (not only) automotive industry right now
| and they just double down on rules, who cares how many coal
| plants China or India fire up. That's up to 15 million jobs
| going slowly (or fast) away. That's economical future being
| taken away from financial core of EU by at best some
| idealistic bureaucrats. Tens of millions of immigrants and
| refugees, you see them everywhere, mostly without work,
| barely surviving. What's the plan for them? Nothing that
| makes long term sense.
|
| EU is in decline and things are not that great for most
| folks. We don't have the illusion of 'American dream' to
| keep poor people in line and chasing some illusion of
| potential to massive success. And that decline ain't gonna
| magically stop just because it will be annoying.
| bogantech wrote:
| > You should travel a bit around the world, you would
| then understand how high NZ stands globally
|
| They come from Europe to NZ - that is literally
| travelling the world.
|
| There's a reason a large proportion of kiwis move to
| Australia and not the other way around.
| theshackleford wrote:
| Your reply is rife with logical fallacies that has little
| to nothing to do with anything originally raised.
|
| > People want paradise and absolute success on all fronts
| of existence, now, I mean right fucking now or they are
| losers.
|
| Complete straw man argument.
|
| > I have trouble having sympathies with rich folks
| complaining that they can't buy central houses in main
| capital city right out of pocket from first 2 years
| salary
|
| Ad hominem. Try engaging with the actual point rather
| than resorting to thinly veiled personal attacks.
|
| > Same situation all over the world
|
| False equivalence.
|
| > Be prepared half of folks will be either very welcoming
| of Russian attack on Europe
|
| > EU green deal is killing European (not only) automotive
| industry right now
|
| This bizzare tangent has absolutely nothing to do with
| addressing or refuting any of the specific points made
| about NZ's economy, infrastructure or cost of living.
|
| > You should travel a bit around the world, you would
| then understand how high NZ stands globally
|
| First of all, they have. They are an immigrant. Not to
| mention its an appeal to relative privation. You can't
| just dismiss legitimate criticisms by claiming they are
| not valid because worse problems exist elsewhere.
|
| > Be prepared half of folks will be either very welcoming
| of Russian attack on Europe... Tens of millions of
| immigrants and refugees, you see them everywhere
|
| Appeal to emotion.
|
| > People want paradise and absolute success... it's an
| immature approach
|
| You're projecting.
| naasking wrote:
| > if you stop doing social science (which isn't a science) then
| what do you do when people turn out to need social scientists?
| Aren't we interested in having a balanced, happy society?
|
| Do social scientists actually produce the knowledge required to
| create a balanced, happy society?
| globalnode wrote:
| is that like saying: if we get rid of all the artists to fight
| a war is the country really worth saving?
| ggm wrote:
| That's the apocryphal Churchill quote.
| openrisk wrote:
| Last time I checked economics is also a social science...
|
| If you have a headache cutting your head is not the optimal
| remedy.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| No. But cutting the tumour probably is a remedy. The question
| is are social sciences tumour or the head?
| sabbaticaldev wrote:
| social science is kinda like vegan meat tho
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I don't know. A lot of the discourse meant for social progress
| and revolution became gaurded at the highest echelons of the
| academic system and perverted to suit the needs of the state
| apparatus. In my mind, the end of this practice means at least
| some hope of the work moving back to where it needs to go. On the
| other hand, our society today is highly educated and academic
| work is just a job. A huge swath of the population goes through
| school before entering the work force: how are you going to get
| to them? But, campus organizing has never gone away really, and
| perhaps it will make things especially difficult for
| administrators if they don't have any professors to scapegoat.
| nxobject wrote:
| The question is: how are you going to fund this type of
| thought, and find a funder that values dissemination and public
| engagement? Academics "pay their way" through teaching (even if
| it's second hand by training TAs that teach students.) Private
| philanthropy is often embedded in its own social context - when
| you have lots of money and you're interested in the social
| sciences, you're likely doing so not because you're engaged in
| the public.
|
| I think this type of work is necessary. It's sad that we have
| only a handful of people who've thought about society in ways
| that we can quote... e.g. Chomsky et al. But, sadly, we have to
| fund the people somehow at least...
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| It will be funded, it will always be funded, just not in
| public education. Its impossible to root out critical
| consciousness entirely because that is a condition of
| possibility of capitalism. But like usual, it might stay in
| the halls of the wealthiest private institutions instead,
| where it will not be useful. The crisis will result in
| radical movement either way, even if its unsuccessful.
| Imagine 10,000 Luigi Mangiones working together; there are
| other places this knowledge is disseminated.
| grahar64 wrote:
| The current government is not very popular, to get in power the
| current PM had to make a deal with two devils (ACT and NZF).
| Fortunately they all hate each other and undermine one another at
| many points
| nxobject wrote:
| What are the chances of drastic decisions like these getting
| reversed, if these decisions don't take root too deeply in
| time?
| frio wrote:
| It's likely a future left-wing government will reintroduce
| these funds. The problem is the ratcheting effect: it takes
| no time at all to destroy something like this. Society
| reacts; people leave, people retrain, we lose the ability to
| do the thing we used to do. Then, a new government arrives
| and we rehire into these positions: it takes a lot more money
| to find people, attract them back to the country, get their
| programs established... and then the next government arrives
| and says "wow this is inefficient" and cans it again.
|
| NZ in general is starting to suffer from the swings in
| partisan politics, despite our MMP system. Similar problems
| happen with bread and butter infrastructure projects.
| gm3dmo wrote:
| As somebody who has lived through about three decades of
| Powerpoints that begin and end with
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
|
| where on earth are the management consultancies supposed to steal
| their "ideas" from to generate new fads now. I'm for sure none of
| them have had an original thought of their own.
| fsloth wrote:
| Not sure if this is for or against, but this is a good
| opportunity to argument why concepts developed "in humanities"
| are valuable (in case if it's not obvious :D )
|
| Maslows hierarchy of needs, while possibly inaccurate, is a
| very usefull model and concept to have. As our understanding of
| human condition improves, we need specific terms to understand
| them.
|
| Imagine is there was no word for love or hunger... for
| aristicracy or oligarchy... etc.
| naasking wrote:
| Accuracy and precision is useful. If Maslow's hierarchy of
| needs is neither, I question how useful it truly is. At best
| then, it would a narrative device to tell a persuasive story,
| but the fact that it has no factual basis means you can twist
| it to tell whatever story you want.
|
| This is a problem endemic to social sciences due to the
| replication crisis. Lots of social scientists in this article
| are saying that their field is important to the economy, but
| given they mainly produce results that don't replicate (~30%
| replicate last I checked), maybe they should focus on
| improving that so their ROI is actually compelling.
| wpietri wrote:
| Funny that you should say that. It's not just the social
| sciences that are having a replication crisis. [1] So this
| appears to be some sort of broad social problem that we
| don't totally understand. Seems like we need people who
| study societies to help figure it out.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a
| naasking wrote:
| Social sciences are by far the worst offenders, with
| sociology right at the bottom at ~30% replication rate.
|
| > Seems like we need people who study societies to help
| figure it out.
|
| No, we need people who understand robust quantitative
| analysis and empirical methodologies. Sociologists are
| clearly not them. Open science and preregistration
| initiatives help a lot, but I should note that social
| sciences were also the most vociferous objectors to such
| changes.
| wpietri wrote:
| Did you look at the article I linked? Even many chemists
| and physicists think significant portions of their fields
| have results that can't be reduced. Biology and medicine
| even more so.
|
| Even if the problem were related to robust quantitative
| analysis, the question of why so many _people_ are
| failing to apply particular methods isn 't a question for
| physics or chemistry.
| timschmidt wrote:
| > Accuracy and precision is useful. If Maslow's hierarchy
| of needs is neither, I question how useful it truly is.
|
| https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
| morkalork wrote:
| They're gonna steal from optimization. Are we going with an
| explore vs exploit strategy? We need to get this project into
| the annealing stage and slow down on big changes. What's the
| shortest path to an MVP. We need to branch and bound on
| different features in the prototype.
| blitzar wrote:
| Fortune cookies, classic hallmark greeting cards or twitter
| threads
| dboreham wrote:
| Buddhism?
| rgblambda wrote:
| Easy. They're going to continue to copy/paste Maslow's
| hierarchy of needs into a new PowerPoint like they've always
| done.
|
| They've never needed new ideas before. Why start now?
| fsloth wrote:
| As a trained STEM professional the argumentation why STEM over
| humanities for the society of NZ would be better feels arbitrary
| and shallow.
|
| This looks like a combination of boorish managerialism and
| politically motivated budgeting - but maybe someone from NZ could
| comment?
| fedeb95 wrote:
| I wonder why politics is always the last thing being cut...
| macleginn wrote:
| Someone is probably already working on a grant application, 'A
| longitudinal study of a small nation's divestment from social
| sciences and the humanities'. They will have to ask for a lot of
| travel money.
| fcatalan wrote:
| This is so myopic. I feel it's similar to the scrapping of
| Philosophy from the common high school curriculum here in Spain.
| It was thrown away as the uninteresting rants of beardy old men,
| to make space for things like some trite dabbling with Word and
| Excel billed as "digitalization". So now things like History,
| Literature and many STEM subjects feel completely ungrounded.
| When my kids have some trouble understanding things and they ask
| me, the answer is very often something I learned studying
| Philosophy.
|
| So now let's also not do any research on for example... Social
| Networks. It's not that they are a relevant aspect of modern life
| worthy of careful observation. Don't dare look closely into what
| the overlords are doing.
| deadbabe wrote:
| What else is there to research about Social Networks? They're
| bad, but people get addicted. Nothing else to it. Not sure why
| people should just get funding forever to constantly arrive at
| the same conclusion.
| pipe2devnull wrote:
| I also agree they are bad but to simplify anything down to
| "it's bad there's nothing else to learn" seems like a gross
| oversimplification.
| acdha wrote:
| "What else is there to research about disease? They're bad,
| but people get infected."
|
| These are things which shape our world, it's worth
| understanding them at a level which doesn't fit on a bumper
| sticker - and, right-wing mythology aside, the cost is not
| very high. Academics are cheap and their work almost always
| has spin-off benefits, even if that's just providing a place
| for people to learn general research skills they take on to
| the workplace.
| wpietri wrote:
| Just off the top of my head: 1) what specific mechanisms are
| used to hook people initially? 2) What specific mechanisms
| sustain or deepen the addiction? 3) What actual value do the
| provide to users? 4) Who specifically do they harm, and by
| how much? 5) Who uses them without harm? 6) What societal
| impacts, positive and negative, do they have?
|
| And I could keep going, but you get the idea. Any one of
| those could be a hundred research projects.
|
| Even if your sole goal was to regulate them out of existence,
| you'd need a lot more than "I think Facebook is bad". You'd
| at least need a solid enough definition of the problem to
| craft the ban in such a way that it stuck. But that's a very
| unlikely outcome, so most of the people working on this are
| looking to minimize harm while maximizing value, and that
| just requires a lot of detailed research. For example,
| compare Facebook vs Mastodon, or vs HN. Do we ban them all,
| because "social networks bad"?
| dgfitz wrote:
| 1.) Dopamine feedback from people interacting with you
| online 2.) Dopamine feedback loop 3.) Very little 4.)
| Everyone who gets hit by a car while someone watches tiktok
| while driving, all the children desperate to interact with
| their parents, but the parents are glued to their phone.
| The kids who commit suicide because of what they see on
| social media. I can keep going. 5.) maybe 3% of people 6.)
| Very little positive societal impact, see above
|
| And I didn't even need funding to figure this out.
| wpietri wrote:
| I hate to break it to you, but spouting a little pop
| science jargon plus some anecdotes is not "figuring it
| out" for the purposes of actually fixing anything. If it
| were, then they "do your own research" people would have
| health care sorted out already.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| But what policies work in regulating them? Street drugs are
| bad, and outright prohibition in the war on drugs has failed
| for many different reasons. Figuring out how to stop
| incentivised organized crime, street gangs is hard.
| Understanding how decriminalization does or doesn't work is
| hard. Does giving out free needles reduce harm by preventing
| disease or increase harm by enabling use? What economic or
| social policies would indirectly help? Does high housing
| costs drive homeless, drive addiction so we should all be
| YIMBYs or does abuse, lead to job loss, lead to homelessness.
| The truth is very complex and hard to figure how how to fix
| it.
|
| Social media is a similar type of problem. You probably can't
| outright ban them, in democratic countries there is too much
| demand and there would be backlash. Even if not, underground
| social media would arise, as it does already in countries
| where it is restricted. Can you regulate it? If so, what
| works? Certain ages? Restrict algorithmic curation? Chang
| liability rules? Better educate people about the costs and
| benefits and good use? Enable more heavy handed censorship
| and content filtration? Require real names and public have
| strong libel laws that are enforced? What about foreign
| ownership or influence campaigns? Corporate advertising?
| Monopoly and anti-truest issues? What about standards around
| interoperability and federation? Should they be free, or
| require subscriptions?
|
| Tons of stuff to figure out.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Ban ads would be a great start.
| worik wrote:
| > Tons of stuff to figure out.
|
| I am in New Zealand
|
| The people behind d this policy do not think there is "Tons
| of stuff to figure out."
|
| They are like many commentators here, they (think they)
| know it all.
|
| It is, I hope, the last gasp of the old Thatcherist guard.
| "There is no such thing as society...just individuals "
|
| They see everything through a materialistic lense, are
| desperate to reduce taxes (it is a fetish), and are doing
| incredible damage to the infrastructure of our society
|
| Politics, sigh
|
| The government they replaced (earnest left wing types) had
| some good ideas but were very centrist, paternal, and
| astoundingly incompetent
|
| The prognosis is not good for my home country
| abraae wrote:
| Came to add my input as a NZer but yeah, this sums it up.
|
| Most annoyingly to me there is no true green party to
| vote for. The actual NZ green party's primary focus is on
| what would be labeled socialist outcomes by someone with
| a US perspective.
| worik wrote:
| > What else is there to research about Social Networks?
| They're bad, but people get addicted.
|
| This is a social network
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| And given how often I come here in the average day, looking
| for _something_ new /interesting, you could make a case for
| addiction...
| andrepd wrote:
| Next door (PT) the right wing also wants to cut down on several
| things: social sciences, philosophy, sex ed. Part of (1) a
| crusade against what is perceived to be "the communists
| brainwashing your kids", and (2) an idea that schools and
| universities ought only to teach that which the market
| requires. So yes to STEM because it has economical value, and
| no to social sciences, arts, or philosophy because according to
| The Market it doesn't.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| It would help if academic philosophy wasn't so full of
| charlatans. Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, et al are fashionable
| nonsense and I don't want my kids reading this nonsense and
| then coming home and asking me about the oedipus or Electra
| complex (as though they are not fake nonsense).
|
| Psychoanalysis is a fake discipline.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Foucalt is the intersection of power and media: the use of
| "science" as a body, rather than a process, as a means of
| control.
|
| Deluze is methods of community organization beyond the
| heirarchial.
|
| Derrida is, well, literary criticism. You want Baudrillard
| for a less-incomprehensible take.
|
| (Oedipus is Freud and Electra is Jung, and they are both
| well-understood to mostly be full of nonsense.)
| wpietri wrote:
| As far as I know, Freudian psychoanalysis has been dead
| academically as long as I've been alive. Complaining about it
| is pretty close to complaining about how physics is stuffed
| with all these people who believe in the lumineferous aether.
| [1]
|
| Were a lot of Freud's initial ideas discredited? Definitely.
| But the same is true of Isaac Newton, who was an alchemist
| and theologian. Consider his recipe for curing plague with
| toad amulets. [2]
|
| The beginnings of any sort of knowledge are messy. But
| progress is possible.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether
|
| [2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/02/isaac-
| newton-p...
| superfunny wrote:
| When I was studying literature a few decades ago,
| psychoanalysis still thrived within critical literary
| analysis.
| wpietri wrote:
| Sorry, I should have specified that I was talking about
| psychology and sociology. Happy to believe it was part of
| crit lit then.
| wbl wrote:
| Have you read Discipline and Punish? Foucault be hard to read
| in parts but he did the research and it shows up on every
| page. I disagree vehemently with his thesis, but there's no
| denying it has impact for a reason.
| scoofy wrote:
| As someone with multiple degrees in philosophy... yes, there
| are obviously very eccentric views. Just steer clear of
| Continental Philosophy if it bothers you.
|
| The idea that we aren't teaching children the works in the
| Modern and Analytic tradition is truly a shame, however,
| given the conflict with religiosity, it does not surprise me
| that public education programs avoid it for political
| reasons.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yeah, 18 months ago I was struggling with a philosophy book and
| on the street saw an ad for a professor who does tutoring. I
| thought, "What the heck!" and signed up to see what happened.
| We meet every couple of weeks and it has been great. I don't in
| general find philosophy's answers particularly useful, but the
| questions and the habit of questioning has been great.
|
| I do get though, why systems of power want to defund things
| like philosophy and sociology. Good questions and good data are
| two things that run counter to the willful exercise of power.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I'm sure I'm in the minority here. When I see these kinds of
| comments, the first thing I think of the movie Good Will
| Hunting:
|
| You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50
| in late fees at the public library.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yeah, there's a lot of education you can't get just by
| reading books. Which is exactly why I ended up hiring a
| tutor.
|
| Philosophy in specific is one long argument, 2500 years of
| new people showing up and saying, "Well that guy's wrong
| and I'm right." So much of what I needed to know to make
| sense of philosophical arguments is either hugely scattered
| or not written down at all. It was vastly more efficient
| just to hire an expert.
|
| That's not to argue for the $150k education; I wouldn't
| know. But I don't think that taking life advice from
| fictional characters is much better.
| asoneth wrote:
| > You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for
| $1.50 in late fees at the public library.
|
| Does the rest of the movie support that claim? Will Hunting
| had book smarts but required significant effort from
| several people to get him to the point where he was ready
| to meaningfully apply his intelligence.
|
| I've hired a handful of folks who learned solely by self-
| study and while none of them required the level of support
| Will did, they all took significantly more effort to get to
| the point where they contributed productively than hires
| who attended university or had previously collaborated with
| experts.
|
| Not saying that requires a degree, but even the most
| brilliant people benefit from collaborating with like
| minds.
| cossatot wrote:
| I've tought myself a lot of things over the course of my
| life and am a huge proponent of self-education, but a lot
| of the 'learning how to learn' had to happen in graduate
| school. There are few environments that provide the right
| combination of time, close involvement of experts and
| peers, the latitude to direct your research in a way that
| you find interesting and useful within the larger
| constraints of a project, the positive and negative
| feedback systems, the financial resources from grant
| funding, etc.
|
| The negative feedback loops are particularly hard to set up
| by yourself. At some point if you're going to be at the
| researcher level (construed broadly), you need help from
| others in developing sufficient dept, rigor and self-
| criticality. Others can poke holes in your thoughts with an
| ease that you probably can't muster on your own initially;
| after you've been through this a number of times you learn
| your weaknesses and can go through the process more easily.
| Similarly, the process of preparing for comprehensive exams
| in a PhD (or medical boards or whatever) is extremely
| helpful, but not something most people would do by
| themselves--the motivation to know a field very broadly and
| deeply, so you can explain all of this on the spot in front
| of 5 inquisitors, is given a big boost by the consequences
| of failure, which are not present in the local library.
|
| The time is also a hard part. There are relatively few
| people with the resources to devote most of their time for
| learning outside of the classroom. I spent approximately
| 12,000 hours on my PhD (yes some fraction of that was
| looking at failblog while hungover etc. but not much). You
| could string that along at 10 hours a week, 50 weeks a
| year, which is a 'serious hobby', but it would take you 24
| years. How much of the first year are you going to remember
| 24 years later? How will the field have changed?
| goatlover wrote:
| Assuming one has the self-motivation and ignores everything
| else that goes with attending a university. Most people
| aren't super geniuses who spend their days reading books
| from the library or online papers.
| logicchains wrote:
| Most people who aren't self-motivated will almost
| completely stop studying anything new after university
| anyway, and will still end up far behind the motivated
| people. Far better if they were put in a situation where
| they were forced to learn how to motivate themselves and
| study of their own accord.
| goatlover wrote:
| Who is doing this forcing? A college degree is more about
| getting a job and starting their career for a lot of
| people anyways.
| wpietri wrote:
| The forcing doesn't have to be particularly dramatic. One
| of the things I like having about a tutor is it "forces"
| me to make some progress on a regular basis. As a friend
| of mine put it, "Sometimes I need somebody to not
| disappoint."
| globalnode wrote:
| I want to say something along the lines of "they want to de
| fund critical thinking in general" but I fear I'm becoming
| too extreme. I'll go with what you said instead.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yeah, I suspect few of them directly want that. But I also
| think few of them are inclined to appreciate the benefits
| of it.
|
| But it does happen intentionally that way some times for
| sure. E.g., the way the US's Dickey Amendment defunded gun
| research to prevent any inconvenient facts from coming to
| light.
| Dansvidania wrote:
| I do not know how things look in New Zealand, but I would
| argue that, on average, very little critical thinking is
| thought in university or college. In neither the humanities
| or STEM.
|
| I think good professors that focus on that are the
| exception and not the rule, sadly.
| worik wrote:
| > do not know how things look in New Zealand, but I would
| argue that, on average, very little critical thinking is
| thought in university or college. In neither the
| humanities or STEM.
|
| I am in New Zealand
|
| I have been through the university system here, my family
| still closely involved
|
| A great deal of critical thinking happens in New Zealand
| universities
| mistrial9 wrote:
| there is no unified "they" .. instead I think you are
| identifying a difficult fork in the road of education..
| exploratory and associative free-will versus collective
| learned information up to disciplined obedience. A full
| society needs both! neither are inherently better ! It is
| indeed a difficult subject. People in the disciplined
| obedience camp do sometimes prioritize their own ways for
| funding, and vice-versa, for sure ..
| hnbad wrote:
| I don't know about that. China seems to have found a
| middle ground that allows for a pretense of exploratory
| and associative free-will ("special economic zones",
| China even has billionaires) with people in reality being
| one wrong move away from the usual sudden and drastic
| crackdown you'd associate with its style of government.
|
| On the other hand Western democracies largely seem to
| fund this kind of "exploratory and associative free-will"
| to the benefit of their aristocracies (i.e. wealthy
| people who hold a lot of social, economic and often
| political power but can not actually directly control the
| government itself despite often benefiting from selective
| enforcement) while at the same time clearly being aware
| that ideas like the state monopoly of violence (even in
| the US) or the "right for a country to defend itself" are
| vital to the state's continued existence and that
| democracy is a threat to that ulterior motive if taken
| too seriously.
|
| China seems to be an example of a "disciplined obedience"
| system adapting to its economic environment (more the
| international one than the internal one) whereas "the
| West" seems to provide examples of systems creating
| layers of misdirection to hide their inherent
| "disciplined obedience" based nature that ensures their
| self-preservation.
| Dansvidania wrote:
| Just for the sake of looking at what good intent might have
| caused this decision..
|
| I would argue that, in periods of scarcity, it makes sense to
| prioritize public spending on what has a more tangible
| economic ROI. I recognize that I am extrapolating from the
| fact that STEM related jobs tend to be more remunerative than
| social science.
|
| I could not find any literature regarding ROI of research
| programs.
| wpietri wrote:
| We aren't particularly in a period of scarcity. New
| Zealand's a rich country with a stable GDP.
|
| Also, ROI is the wrong frame to use for government
| activity. If something has significant short-term ROI, then
| normal commercial capital's a good match. If it has large
| long-term ROI, then that's VC's domain. It's government's
| job to make investments in public goods, things that don't
| have ROI in the sense usually meant here.
| nprateem wrote:
| It's not that myopic though is it? Over the last 2 or so years
| breakthroughs in AI have given us access to a new level of
| technology. It's a rich seam to mine, so society is likely to
| benefit more from a state focussing its research on it instead
| of e.g. understanding Maori migration a few hundred years ago.
| A stronger economy leads to more funding for public services to
| support people alive today.
| spookie wrote:
| Understanding one's past is understanding one's future.
| boznz wrote:
| History has been pretty well uncovered, whether people
| listen to it and learn its lessons is another matter
| (schools certainly don't teach it unless it is how the
| white male oppressors fucked over everyone and it is the
| cause of all the worlds evils).
|
| Most historical debate these days is also pretty
| subjective, egos-versus-egos for clicks and likes (and
| research money) Don't get me started on the subjective
| biases of social "science"
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > History has been pretty well uncovered
|
| This is just absolutely factually wrong and betrays a
| total lack of understanding of the field. History
| manuscripts are released constantly that are
| investigating and discussing contents of the archive that
| have been sitting in a box unexamined since the time of
| their creation. Even if you take the outrageously limited
| view of history that it just exists to document the past,
| we make significant progress constantly.
|
| There's also no research money in the field for egos to
| squabble over. Research grants for historians are
| regularly in the "couple of thousand dollars" range.
| boznz wrote:
| I wish I could agree, and happy to be shot down but I am
| not seeing anything that is not just a re-interpretation
| of current facts to make history sound nicer. there has
| certainly been nothing uncovered this century that has
| changed anything and I mean anything important about the
| current world and the original article was about economic
| benefits to our country which there frankly are none.
| Subjective "research" IMHO is a waste of taxpayer dollars
| when objective research is still underfunded.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Can you list four or five monographs published in the
| past two years that you've read?
| nprateem wrote:
| Lol SF has woken up.
|
| Yes and developing new commercially viable tech pays for
| one's future.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| That's the kind of reasoning the USSR's Communist party
| embraced back then. It turns out that state planning of
| research doesn't works very well in the long run. In the
| short term it kind of does because all you have to do is
| catch-up with the state of the art in a handful of _priority
| domains_ , but when these domains stale then you're screwed
| because that's all the research you have.
| worik wrote:
| Understanding how Maori and Pakeha react differently in
| different situations is crucial to good social services
|
| If you do not study the society you live in how do you act in
| a socially positive way? How do you know what public services
| are even required if you refuse to look?
| nprateem wrote:
| If there's not much money in the kitty to pay for the
| services it's academic. Far better to focus on potentially
| valuable tech so there is money to pay for things later,
| and do research then if there's any question how to spend
| it.
| worik wrote:
| > Far better to focus on potentially valuable tech
|
| To who's benefit?
|
| That is why social research is as important. Otherwise
| all the good tech will reinforce tho old injustices. None
| of us want that, I assume
| EasyMark wrote:
| I really wish classes on basic philosophy and
| skepticism/propaganda techniques were taught in high school as
| mandatory class. People need to learn to question propaganda
| and demand sources and logic when people try to "convince" them
| of "thangs and stuff". Too many youngsters trust the crap on
| the internet without question if it makes them "feel" good or
| "a part of something" or any other number of emotional
| responses to tiktoks and instagram tripe.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| In my opinion the main problem is that there are too many
| graduates from certain social sciences and humanities compared to
| the actual need of employers / academia. It would be better to
| have fewer scientists with adequate and consistent funding, than
| lots of underemployed scientists fighting for funding and living
| under constant uncertainty.
|
| Scrapping all support for any particular branch of science is an
| overreaction, but cutting number of graduates in these fields and
| focusing funding only on the studies with most practical benefits
| could make sense. As an example, social scientist studying
| poverty, unemployment or crime could produce useful information
| for policymakers to reduce these phenomena, and cutting all
| funding from such research is probably a bad idea.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Right level of funding in many cases is non-zero. Still
| balancing for employability and general funding say every 5
| years would be reasonable approach for most social sciences. As
| many of the fields under that moniker produce very useful
| specialist when run at right scale. And these people might not
| even need PhDs always.
| nxobject wrote:
| Re: PhDs... the "the system's purpose is what it does"
| explanation of a PhD program is to get cheap labor, without
| the employment conditions of standard employees, in exchange
| for the long-term promise of the letters after your name,
| sadly. There's a reason that, in the US, graduate student
| researchers often have union/bargaining units separate from
| postdoctoral academics, and it's not to benefit the graduate
| students.
| lolinder wrote:
| > too many graduates from certain social sciences and
| humanities compared to the actual need of employers / academia.
|
| The real problem is that college was never designed to be job
| preparation and (with limited exceptions) it does rather poorly
| at that. The idea was never that you'd go to college to
| research a subject at the bachelor level and then go into a
| career that directly uses what you learned--it wasn't always a
| white collar trade school.
|
| Back when college was the privilege of the elite, it was about
| learning for learning's sake and about making connections and
| meeting people. It didn't especially matter what subject you
| chose to learn about--you're a member of the elite after all,
| and you either have money already or have the family
| connections to get it whatever you studied.
|
| It seems to have only been once college started to democratize
| that we started expecting every subject to be job prep for
| something specific. On one level this makes sense--you can't
| actually democratize the experience of learning for learning's
| sake alone until you democratize being guaranteed sufficient
| money to live on. But only a few departments in most
| universities are even capable of reshaping themselves into job
| training programs, leaving the rest to now frantically justify
| their existence.
|
| This is a huge problem because the knowledge produced by those
| departments--even while they were only the privilege of the
| elite--has been invaluable. But they don't meet the modern
| economics of the university.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The US state college system was pretty much never for elites,
| it was always about increasing the capacity of the country.
| lolinder wrote:
| But how was "increasing the capacity of the country"
| conceptualized? I can believe that it was put together with
| the intention of strengthening the new country and building
| up institutions that it felt it needed, but that's not at
| all the same thing as being not for the elite (at the time
| of the founding of the first state schools we still had
| property requirements to _vote_!), much less that they
| conceived of it as job training.
|
| For a primary source on how they conceptualized the role of
| the university, see the charter for the University of
| Georgia (1785) [0]. It essentially says that universities
| are really important and it would be unacceptable to have
| to send youths to foreign countries, so we're starting one
| here. They weren't reconceptualizing the university, they
| were funding the rapid development of institutions that
| would otherwise take centuries to develop if at all.
|
| [0] https://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead%2FU
| A22-0...
| bluGill wrote:
| The US is a young country for this discussion. Other than
| maybe the likes of Harvard college was already
| democratizing around the world when US colleges started.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I'm really not sure how many more Literature papers we need
| on Proust, Shakespeare, Beowulf, and on and on. They have to
| continue to pump out papers and books, exclusively read by
| other people in the same subjects. "Invaluable" this is not
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| How much money do you think the Lord of the Rings, as the
| modern multimedia francise it is, makes? Do you think
| Tolkien, the first time he cracked open an Old English tome
| of Beowulf thought to himself, "someday, being a Beowulf
| scholar will lead to me creating a vast amount of money for
| Warner Bros."?
|
| Academic outcomes are nonlinear. Outside of the job-
| training-ified fields like engineering, there is seldom a
| direct "I studied X and then made a ton of money doing
| exactly that". The success stories, like Tolkien, are more
| like, "I studied X, then I lost a finger in the great war,
| then I typed up a manuscript of a children's fairy tale,
| fast forward 100 years and it's worth untold millions." It
| is a winding road. All that is gold does not glitter, not
| all who wander are lost.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I would transfer these people into making podcasts, self-
| published books, social media feeds, and other forms of
| content that are actually consumed. Trying to read one of
| these papers in an academic journal is mind numbing. The
| college model is way too expensive and has very little
| societal value vs. its cost
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| Academic papers aren't _for_ mass consumption. You can 't
| replace the depth of consideration and knowledge needed
| to write an academic paper with hosting a podcast or
| self-publishing a book. Writing for an audience of
| leading experts is inherently different from writing for
| consumption by non-experts.
|
| And you can't just equate societal value with "how many
| people consume it". An academic paper is often as
| valuable as a tool for crystalizing thoughts in the mind
| of the author as it is a tool for communicating to the
| reader.
|
| I kind of feel like you are missing the point of
| academia.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Can you link to a single high-impact Proust journal paper
| published in the last 50 years?
| consteval wrote:
| You haven't actually measured the societal value because
| you can't. You might mean economic value, but you haven't
| measured that either.
|
| Regardless, what makes money and what's good for society
| are orthogonal, and sometimes outright at odds with each
| other. Certainly, it's easier to make money via evil than
| make money via good. And, certainly, economy is flexible
| - it can be anything. We can have a strong economy making
| trains, if we want. "Free market" capitalism is not the
| sole economic system nor is it the most efficient. It
| seems China has a much more efficient economic system.
|
| I argue higher education is good for society, even if it
| doesn't make money. Critical thinking is vital in
| decision making, and the humanities have a bigger
| emphasis on critical thinking (yes, really). Software
| engineering is "hard", but not really. Literary analysis
| is a different beast which requires a different kind of
| intelligence, one that is lacking in STEM.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| The "the value of Proust papers is unquantifiable!"
| argument doesn't move me. Nor a lot of my fellow citizens
| bluGill wrote:
| A few papers are interesting to read. However I don't have
| time to read all the papers on even on of the above, much
| less all. Thus the original point that these things are
| valuable to society in small numbers but not in larger
| numbers - except as job training of some sort.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _not sure how many more Literature papers we need on
| Proust, Shakespeare, Beowulf, and on and on_
|
| You generally want a few scholars on low burn keeping the
| knowledge alive and contemporary. The idea that something
| can be studied in totality and then put away safely across
| generations is farce.
| fallingknife wrote:
| But, as you mentioned, you only need a few. The problem
| is that universities have been expanded from something
| only for the elite to something for half the population,
| but they have replicated the structure they had back when
| they were for the elite. So now we end up with 20x the
| number of these scholars that we actually need.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I think we are at the point where Patreon & podcasts can
| keep the best researchers self-funded and working on
| these niche subjects full time, creating content that is
| actually consumed rather than stored as dense, esoteric,
| unintelligible nonsense locked into pay-for academic
| journals. The college model is wildly expensive and
| devoid of societal value
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think that is a pretty wild take. I get that people
| question the social value of esoteric academic research,
| but do you really think it is fungible with entertainment
| research?
| monero-xmr wrote:
| They are producing something that no one reads with zero
| impact. It is funded by undergraduate lectures and
| subsidies from other parts of the university and
| taxpayers at large.
|
| They could instead produce lectures for society -
| "podcasts" - and continue their mind-numbing paper
| writing, if that's truly what they want to do all day
| (hint: no they don't).
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| That all may be true, but that still doesn't mean the
| outputs are the same in depth, complexity, or
| understanding
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _where Patreon & podcasts can keep the best researchers
| self-funded and working on these niche subjects full
| time_
|
| This is how you turn your society's intellectual
| storehouses into propaganda. _Lost to the West_ , about
| how Byzantine scholars preserved Roman knowledge through
| to the Enlightenment, is worth picking up.
| spicymaki wrote:
| > I think we are at the point where Patreon & podcasts
| can keep the best researchers self-funded...
|
| What I believe you are saying is that the "popular"
| researchers will get ad-spend to fund their "research"
| that won't be peer reviewed. Why even bother publishing
| research, if no one reads anymore? It would just devolve
| into a popularity contest and following trends. Those
| trends will just be co-opted by monied interests.
|
| The esoterism is due to the fact that there is a body of
| research that you need to know to understand the new
| research. Just because you can't understand the topic in
| a short sound bite does not mean it is not worth
| researching. Not all of the research is intended to be
| consumed by a lay public either.
|
| Many podcasts and Patreon exclusives are behind paywalls
| and there is no expectation of peer-review.
|
| In regards to calling this a "college model", not all
| research is done at college there is also thinktanks
| (institutions) and industry research which are funded by
| governments as well.
|
| I think governments should be accountable for making sure
| the research is rigorous, has a social benefit, and is
| publicly available.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I don't see why my tax dollars need to fund Proust
| studies, nor Elvis and Hip Hop researchers for that
| matter. It's all for elites to feel like they are doing
| something useful, "research", that no one would ever
| voluntarily fund otherwise. Or if they would, they should
| find a way to get paid voluntarily.
| dgfitz wrote:
| You mean, like alchemy, sorcery, or perhaps homeopathy?
| dgfitz wrote:
| I sure was hoping for a response to this. Ah well.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| really? As an outsider, your post came off to me as
| combative and generally bad faith.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| The early universities outside of Europe where mostly
| vocational training for the clergy. And the first big
| expansion of US based public universities was with the land
| grant system, which explicitly focused on ag an engineering
| type programs - still often a strong suit of these
| universities today.
| lolinder wrote:
| That's why those programs are some of the exceptions in
| being good at job prep, but rates of college attendance
| remained very low for another 80+ years until after WW2, so
| the elite who could afford to study whatever still made up
| a big chunk of most schools' income. As college attendance
| rates went higher and higher the job preparation need
| became the primary one the school is serving, which changed
| the economics in a way that simply having a few job
| preparation programs didn't.
| guappa wrote:
| University started to learn law and medicine. Two things that
| were and still are very remunerative.
| lolinder wrote:
| There's a reason why those have different degree
| abbreviations--they're a different _kind_ of thing than the
| degrees universities later arrived at and spent centuries
| developing. And they and a few others (like engineering
| fields) are still the only ones that really work as job
| training.
|
| It's a good point insofar as it shows the institution has
| never been static.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Theology was the main subject in first universities.
| golli wrote:
| I think another important issue is how the societal and
| cultural evaluation of university degrees compared to
| alternatives like apprenticeships in crafts has shifted.
|
| The former is held in much higher regard as far as social
| standing goes even if we probably need many more of the
| latter, it requires lots of training as well, and you can
| even earn pretty good money.
| confidantlake wrote:
| Colleges started out as vocational schools for priests. For
| much of American history colleges were places for farmers or
| engineers to learn their crafts. For my entire lifetime
| colleges were places you went to prepare you for a career.
|
| Colleges being mainly a place for elites to fraternize, if it
| ever really existed, was a short lived phenomenon and
| certainly not how they were founded or the role they serve
| now. No one is giving out hundred thousand dollar plus loans
| so that you can learn for the sake of learning.
| allturtles wrote:
| Your history isn't really right here:
|
| > Colleges started out as vocational schools for priests
|
| There were _three_ advanced schools (~graduate departments)
| at the typical medieval university: medicine, law, and
| theology.
|
| > For much of American history colleges were places for
| farmers or engineers to learn their crafts.
|
| I'm guessing you are basing this claim on the Morrill Act,
| which was to "provide colleges for the benefit of
| agriculture and the Mechanic arts."[0] It certainly doesn't
| describe the earlier American colleges like Harvard,
| Princeton, Yale, King's College (later Columbia), etc.
|
| But even the state colleges that were founded with the help
| of the Morrill Act typically had loftier ambitions than
| acting as craft schools. e.g. from the inaugural speech of
| the founding of the University of California:
|
| "The University is the most comprehensive term which can be
| employed to indicate a foundation for the promotion at
| diffusion of knowledge--a group of agencies organized to
| advance the arts and sciences of every sort, and to train
| young men as scholars for all the intellectual callings of
| life." [1]
|
| But surely schools like Texas Agricultural and Mechanical
| were founded from the beginning with a focus on those
| practical skills? Nope: "Despite its name, the college
| taught no classes in agriculture, instead concentrating on
| classical studies, languages, literature, and applied
| mathematics." [2]
|
| [0]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/morrill-
| act
|
| [1]: https://oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb267nb0qk&brand=oac4
| &doc.v...
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Texas_A%26M_U
| nivers...
| confidantlake wrote:
| You say I am wrong but none of what you said actually
| contradicts what I claimed.
|
| You mentioned there were 3 advanced schools at the
| typical medieval university. While this is true, what I
| said was what the first ones were founded as which was
| the divinity school.
|
| Then your claims about what a founder said in his speech
| about what he hoped the school would one day become is
| pretty irrelevant to what I said and no way makes me
| wrong. Overall a pretty bizarre response.
| cess11 wrote:
| Who cares about "the actual need of employers"? If they have
| needs, they can see to it that they are met. Create their own
| schools or educate people on the job or whatever, it's not a
| purpose of educational institutions like universities and so
| on.
| zdragnar wrote:
| And yet, every college and University in the US advertises
| the job placement rate of graduates.
|
| I myself considered a track that would lead to law school,
| and one of the things that stopped me was there were a
| growing number of lawsuits against schools for falsely
| inflating their numbers.
| cess11 wrote:
| Perhaps, but I'll advise my kids to avoid failed and
| harshly authoritarian states.
| fallingknife wrote:
| > Who cares about "the actual need of employers"?
|
| 99% of college students and 100% of college administrators
| whose schools will all cease to exist if they can't convince
| those students to enroll and pay tuition.
| dgfitz wrote:
| They had issues before this NZ thing.
|
| https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/traditional-
| a...
| cess11 wrote:
| Educational institutions aren't commercial. If it's run in
| a commercial manner, it's not an educational institution,
| it's a business.
| panzagl wrote:
| > too many graduates from certain social sciences and
| humanities compared to the actual need of employers / academia.
|
| The natural employer of the social sciences grad is the
| government- social workers, city planners, etc. This type of
| government funding has been under attack at all levels of
| government since the 80's. We don't see any benefit to, say,
| sociology, because we've bought the idea that those benefits
| only go to those that don't 'deserve' them, and are paid for by
| taking what I've 'earned'.
| michaelt wrote:
| For context, this is "the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund" for "blue
| sky research"
|
| Out of a total university income of $4 billion per annum from a
| variety of sources https://www.universitiesnz.ac.nz/about-
| university-sector/how...
| refurb wrote:
| Considering the track record of studies done in the social
| sciences and reproducibility, I'm not sure New Zealand is really
| going to lose much here.
|
| https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/amid-a-replicati...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The reproducibility crisis is present in almost all fields,
| though social sciences are definitely a place where it pops up
| often. Using it as an excuse to cut funding only makes the
| problem worse.
|
| Computer science is also pretty embarrassing as a field of
| science:
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359147521_Reproduci...
| Based on this result (0%), New Zealand may as well dispose of
| all computer science studies as well.
| naasking wrote:
| > Using it as an excuse to cut funding only makes the problem
| worse
|
| Or it's a wake up call to shift focus to better methodologies
| that will reproduce more reliably. Time will tell.
|
| > Based on this result (0%), New Zealand may as well dispose
| of all computer science studies as well.
|
| Lots of computer science research produces useful products
| that make their own money directly, and so the need for
| reproducibility is less if impact on the economy is a main
| criterion. This is not true of pure research in fields that
| only produce knowledge. Reproducibility is key to be
| confident you actually have knowledge.
| notahacker wrote:
| > Lots of computer science research produces useful
| products that make their own money directly, and so the
| need for reproducibility is less if impact on the economy
| is a main criterion.
|
| That research isn't being conducted by academics applying
| for pure research funding from the Marsden fund...
| jimbob45 wrote:
| _Computer science is also pretty embarrassing as a field of s
| cience:https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359147521_Rep
| roduci... Based on this result (0%), New Zealand may as well
| dispose of all computer science studies as well._
|
| That paper investigates whether papers are well-formed such
| that the results can be reproducible. That's fair - many
| research papers today are vaguely written with insufficient
| information. However, that's not the issue at hand. The issue
| here is that, even with a perfect paper, social sciences are
| unable to produce replicable results.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > The reproducibility crisis is present in almost all fields,
| though social sciences are definitely a place where it pops
| up often
|
| Seeing this sentiment popping up a lot in this thread, but
| yet planes still fly, solar and batteries are improving like
| crazy...
|
| We are seeing real tangible results that come from the output
| of other fields
|
| We cannot really say the same of the softer sciences
| bux93 wrote:
| Can't have critical thinking in your country now can you?
| tetnis wrote:
| Yes the social sciences are where the critical thinkers are.
| They think so critically that you can't reproduce their work.
| Argonaut998 wrote:
| Social "science" is anti-critical thinking. The scientific
| method is not used. Studies cannot be replicated.
| n144q wrote:
| > it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund
|
| NZ$75 million is almost negligible? How can New Zealand do any
| kind of research or afford to just hire graduate students?
| dralley wrote:
| Numbers that look small by American standards are somewhat more
| significant in a country of 5 million people.
| acdha wrote:
| NZ$15/person still seems like a drop in the bucket out of a
| $3.2B budget, especially since it's boosting the local
| economy rather than going out of the country.
| dralley wrote:
| It's a bit more than 2% of the annual budget. How much
| higher should it go? There are tons of other things that
| need funding - healthcare (NZ has single-payer), coast
| guard / military, industrial / agricultural policy,
| environmental protection, etc.
| acdha wrote:
| The whole thing is a bit more, but much of that is not
| going to social sciences at all and a lot of things which
| are lumped together are useful - economics is a social
| science, for example, and if you search for the EHB code
| on the most recent awardees you'll see that it includes
| things like studies on autism or suicide which seem
| pretty useful to me.
|
| https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/funds-and-
| opportu...
| robertlagrant wrote:
| American numbers fund world research, not just American
| research.
| jmclnx wrote:
| All I see this really doing is increasing the Brain Drain. This
| assumes NZ has a Brain Drain and I am open to being corrected.
| But I am pretty sure it does have one based upon some of the
| comments here.
| permo-w wrote:
| I think I heard that there's been a pretty bad brain drain
| recently due to low wages compared to Australia
| MicolashKyoka wrote:
| good, there is no need for a nation to have an abundance of
| social "scientists".
| Ono-Sendai wrote:
| Cutting all blue-sky social science research does seem to go a
| bit far. On the other hand, I'm not sure NZ needs this:
|
| "The intimate technology shaping millions of lives: Exploring the
| possibilities of menstruation and perimenopause tracking apps for
| people with diverse embodied experiences." - 870k NZD
|
| "It takes a village: Picturing family support for transgender
| young people in Aotearoa" - 870k NZD
|
| "Sensationalising Sleep: Discourses and practices of sleep in
| Aotearoa" - 360K NZD
|
| etc..
|
| From the Marsden fund 2022: https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-
| we-do/funds-and-opportu...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I 'm not sure NZ needs this:_
|
| Throwing the baby out with the bath water makes great sound
| bites for politicians, but weaker societies for everyone else.
| nradov wrote:
| Spending public money on unproductive work makes society
| weaker for everyone else. I'm not necessarily opposed to
| government funding for social science research but it's not
| clear that this research produces a positive ROI for
| taxpayers.
| BadHumans wrote:
| Plenty of government programs that benefit the public are
| not cash flow positive so how do you define a positive
| return on investment?
| michaelt wrote:
| Mostly programs will either have a positive return on
| investment in the conventional sense (e.g. hire more tax
| inspectors, make more tax income),
|
| or have an arguable, positive overall long-term return on
| investment hopefully, (e.g. infrastructure spending,
| sending smart kids to college)
|
| or will enjoy widespread public support and provide non-
| monetary benefits, (e.g. public parks, libraries,
| maternity leave)
|
| or will be widely accepted as a core function of
| government (e.g. police and military), or a morally good
| and virtuous act (e.g. caring for the disabled, foreign
| aid)
|
| or will be the pet project of someone powerful, semi-
| useful, and inexpensive enough no-one cares to fight them
| over it (e.g. opera subsidy)
|
| or will convince people they're one of the above
| regardless of the truth of the matter
|
| or will be at risk of cancellation.
| nradov wrote:
| Government programs like research funding aren't measured
| by cash flow but rather by long term impact on GDP (or
| perhaps other metrics related to quality of life). For
| basic research in the hard sciences we can draw a direct
| line from grant funding in various fields to commercial
| products years later. When it comes to allocating a
| limited pool of government grant funding across fields,
| this shouldn't be the _only_ factor but it has to be _a_
| factor. If nothing else this helps to ensure continued
| public support for government science funding because
| taxpayers see that their money isn 't being frittered
| away.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Cool. Delete your hn account and log off the web. This
| stuff is almost entirely unproductive.
|
| If you hesitate _at all_ it 's because there's something
| you value there
| nradov wrote:
| You missed the word "public". If private individuals or
| foundations want to spend their own money on whatever
| then go ahead. But if bureaucrats are allocating tax
| dollars then there needs to be more careful scrutiny and
| accountability for results. Is it better to spend public
| money on this, or a replacement for the HMNZS Manawanui
| research ship? There are limited funds to go around.
|
| https://maritime-executive.com/article/new-zealand-navy-
| surv...
| kristopolous wrote:
| "fiscal responsibility" and railing about public money
| are usually just ruses used by people pushing a political
| agenda.
|
| I've had countless discussions with people who want to
| spend billions on sports stadiums and the military but
| then scream endlessly about "big government" when it
| comes to the arts and education.
|
| They'll bail out wall street at the drop of a hat and
| then shrug with big eyes, "where's the money going to
| come from" when someone brings up say, having an
| anthropology department at UCLA.
|
| It's an obvious bullshit game of a political project
| masquerading as virtue that you'd have to be a toddler to
| fall for. I don't care.
| nradov wrote:
| I'm not sure where that unhinged rant came from but it
| has zero relevance to my comment. Ultimately there are
| only a limited pool of funds to allocate so hard choices
| have to be made and some people won't get what they want.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| To quote the parent:
|
| > Spending public money on unproductive work makes
| society weaker for everyone else.
|
| I don't think anyone's spending public money on HN.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I don 't think anyone's spending public money on HN._
|
| There are plenty of .edu's and .gov's logging in to HN.
| baud147258 wrote:
| While they might be using an email address from a public
| service doesn't mean they are browsing HN while on the
| job.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Clearly you've never examined the logs of a public forum
| such as this.
|
| I administer one (about 60,000 average monthly users),
| and it's loaded with connections from such institutions.
|
| It's always delightful to see someone talking stupid
| about science get smacked down by someone with a nasa.gov
| connection.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Spending public money on unproductive work makes society
| weaker for everyone else._
|
| Fortunately, the rest of us not computers, and are happy
| that our tax dollars go to symphonies and art and
| orphanages and other "unproductive" works.
| fallingknife wrote:
| When the ratio of bath water to baby reaches a certain point
| it becomes the best solution.
| acheron wrote:
| The head of the physics department goes to the university
| president to ask for money for a new lab. The president says
| "Your department always needs such expensive equipment. Why
| can't you be more like mathematics? All they need are paper,
| pencils, and trash cans. Or even better, sociology only needs
| paper and pencils."
| coliveira wrote:
| In fact universities love Physics departments. They usually
| can justify multi-million dollar expenditures and grants that
| keep the university research afloat.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Usually the third field is philosophy. Sociologists have to
| go out, meet people, and observe things, while philosophers
| can simply think alone in a closet.
| addicted wrote:
| Why do you think these are not important?
|
| Do you think it's not important to know whether all these apps
| that people are feeding private medical data into actually have
| any benefits?
|
| Do you think studying why a certain group of children have
| worse wellbeing than a different group of children is not
| useful?
|
| Considering how important sleep is you don't think determining
| the impact media has on people's sleep is not important?
|
| I'm absolutely ok with the idea that some research gets funded
| that shouldn't. But the fact that even your cherry picked
| sample shows research that even reading a couple of sentences
| of the abstract shows a lot of value indicates that this may be
| even less of an issue than I had imagined.
| Ono-Sendai wrote:
| Re: the menstruation app one - instead of spending 870 k
| talking about what they would like to see in a menstruation
| app, just make one. It's not rocket science.
|
| re: the transgender one, it seems to be one of these social
| science projects that just involves interviewing people. From
| the project page: "This discourse-based research will
| interview twelve transgender young people". Is interviewing
| 12 people for $870,000 NZD a good use of money? I don't think
| so.
| tw1984 wrote:
| > Is interviewing 12 people for $870,000 NZD a good use of
| money? I don't think so.
|
| It is called corruption.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Not sure why you're downvoted.
|
| This is the most likely explanation. Hanlon's razor is
| not relevant anymore, it's actually the opposite these
| days.
|
| People who don't want to see this reality are just
| polezniye duraki that further allow the corrupt people in
| charge to get away with it.
|
| Slightly derailing the topic, one only has to take a look
| at US goverment budget for like 0.001 secs to see how
| deep this problem goes. There are invoices like $500 a
| piece for a fastener.
|
| The duraki will come up to say "oh but that's probably a
| fastener that has to be created in space from the rarest
| material available to be used in an extremely sensitive
| physics experiment". It's not and you're making a fool of
| yourself. The real purpose of those fasteners is to get
| someone a new condo in Miami.
|
| It's just corruption.
| mulmen wrote:
| They're downvoted because there's no evidence of
| corruption. Their assumption is based on false
| information.
|
| > There are invoices like $500 a piece for a fastener.
|
| Please provide an example of this fantastic claim
| including the accounting methodology.
|
| The example that comes to my mind is the $10,000.00
| toilet seat. That turns out to have been three toilet
| seats for the C-5 that had to be custom made because they
| were no longer available. They are now 3-D printed for
| $300.00. These numbers don't explain what was involved in
| making the $10,000.00 one, how it was installed, or how
| long it lasts.
|
| https://www.military.com/defensetech/2018/07/11/air-
| force-no...
| moralestapia wrote:
| *yawn* and here they are ... like flies to a pile of
| garbage ...
|
| Here's a few of them,
|
| https://www.dodig.mil/In-the-
| Spotlight/Article/3948604/press...
|
| https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/10/30/air-force-
| ove...
|
| https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/04/27/pentagon-
| over...
|
| There's even this HN comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42410606
|
| This was a 5 minute Google Search, I can guarantee
| there's much more overspending going on. Oh wait ...
| yeah, why would one believe me if I haven't performed a
| detailed audit of all US Govervement expenses and
| published it to support my claim? Oh no, you got me this
| time ;).
| mulmen wrote:
| I'm not asking for a full audit of all expenses. I'm just
| asking where you got the $500.00 fastener number.
|
| Wasteful military spending is one of those things people
| "just know" but the reality is often more complex than a
| headline.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Read, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literal_and_figurativ
| e_languag...
|
| Or at least live to your own standard,
|
| >turns out to have been three toilet seats
|
| Where's that info?
|
| >that had to be custom made
|
| Where's that info?
|
| >because they were no longer available
|
| Where's that info?
|
| >These numbers don't explain what was involved [...]
|
| Where's the explanation behind them?
|
| What is the "accounting methodology" that was used?
|
| Anyone could play that game and keep the conversation
| stalled indefinitely.
| mulmen wrote:
| Sorry, posted the wrong link earlier: https://www.washing
| tonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-...
|
| It's not about stalling the conversation. It's about
| forming opinions based on actual facts.
| mulmen wrote:
| > Is interviewing 12 people for $870,000 NZD a good use of
| money? I don't think so.
|
| 72 people.
|
| The full abstract is:
|
| > This research explores transgender young people's
| experiences of positive family support in Aotearoa. Family
| support is protective for transgender youth but we lack
| evidence of what it looks like for young people of diverse
| cultures. Our project diversifies research on this topic,
| extending it from parents to young people themselves and
| their broader family, from monocultural majority to
| ethnically diverse participants, and from trauma to
| resilience. Our gender and culturally diverse team will
| interview twelve transgender young people (3 Maori, 3
| Pasifika, 3 Asian, and 3 Pakeha) and five each of their
| most valued supporters. We will use the innovative method
| of reflective drawing, asking participants to draw and
| discuss their experiences of family support. Our visual and
| verbal discourse analysis will paint a picture of how
| families successfully support transgender youth, drawing on
| perspectives of gender diversity and family in Maori,
| Pasifika, Asian and Pakeha communities. This will be the
| first discourse-based research in this area, advancing
| knowledge in transgender studies, family studies and
| language and gender. It will explore how young people and
| their families challenge oppressive social structures
| through discourse and provide insights for those seeking to
| be part of the village that raises a transgender child.
| ink_13 wrote:
| Do you think they just did 12 interviews and then called it
| a day?
| transcriptase wrote:
| The question isn't whether it's important at all, but whether
| it's a worthwhile use of taxpayer money compared to other
| priorities.
|
| With social sciences much of the "qualitative research"
| involves interviewing a small handful of people, interpreting
| their responses to fit a preconceived narrative, and then
| stretching the results into a lengthy paper. This is usually
| done by using the most convoluted synonyms available and
| repeatedly invoking terms like "intersectionality", "lived
| experience", and "power structures" to lend the work an
| academic veneer. The result? A paper that boils down to
| anecdotal evidence supporting the author's opinion, which is
| almost certainly whatever best meshes with their political
| ideology.
| xrisk wrote:
| Regardless, it's important that people document and collect
| such anecdotal evidences (assuming it's done somewhat
| properly and not cherry picked)
|
| In my book, pure numbers can't capture the complex
| realities that people face in their lives.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| "anecdotal evidences" is an oxymoron. Anecdotes by their
| nature cannot be considered evidence of anything, not
| enough to satisfy any level of scientific rigor at least
|
| People can write a blog if they want to document their
| own stories. We don't need to use taxpayer funds to go
| interview them and we _definitely_ do not need to be
| trying to draw scientific conclusions from small handfuls
| of people 's anecdotes
| drdeca wrote:
| Evidence is that which provides a reason/justification to
| change beliefs.
|
| When it was noticed that people working with cows (and
| who were therefore often exposed to cow pox) didn't seem
| to get chickenpox, this seems to me an example of a
| collection of anecdotes, and yet it was evidence.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| It was evidence enough to justify forming a hypothesis
| and getting funding for further study, but not evidence
| to consider it a scientific conclusion. Drawing
| generalizable scientific conclusions is a high bar to
| reach but it should be. Clearing that high bar is what is
| going to actually produce real value for society
|
| A research project that produces a small collection of
| anecdotes is not scientific research, it is journalism.
| There's nothing wrong with that. Those anecdotes might be
| important to share, they might be interesting to hear,
| they might be historically relevant. But we cannot draw
| scientific conclusions from them, which is what we should
| expect from scientific research projects
| drdeca wrote:
| That, I think I can agree with. It seems to me reasonable
| to say that the requirements for something to qualify as
| "scientific evidence" are stricter than to qualify as
| "evidence", and that anecdotes don't qualify as
| "scientific evidence".
| transcriptase wrote:
| Furthermore, once it's published in even the shoddiest
| journal that "research" gets cited by politicians/orgs
| with an agenda as if it was a Nature-worthy large-scale
| longitudinal cohort study of millions.
| xp84 wrote:
| I have no problem with people interviewing them. It
| doesn't cost that much money to do so. The people who are
| interested in learning more about that particular group
| can interview and self-publish books. The government is
| there to help a society do important things to most or
| all of society that are impractical to do individually.
| (e.g. road or rail networks, national defense, space
| program, paying for retirement of workers, medical care
| in most places, etc). Interviewing 12 youths about their
| feelings about gender and writing about it is neither
| impractical to conduct with one person's time and funds,
| nor is it something that more than a small fraction of
| the people are asking for.
| crowcroft wrote:
| I don't have any issue in principle with any of these as
| research topics, but my concerns are.
|
| 1. So what? We do research, maybe we find something out, and
| are we going to do anything?
|
| 2. Would the money be better spent on programmes that do
| something instead of specific research.
|
| 3. What's the process for getting funded, and are decision
| makers bringing their own biases and beliefs into that
| process?
|
| In the context of NZ which is slashing spending on many many
| programmes, you might as well cancel all this research
| spending. Even if research finds that we should intervene and
| provide support for some kind of minority group, there's no
| way it's going to get funded anyway.
| miltonlost wrote:
| Your choice of research you don't like (menstruation,
| perimenopause, support for transgender youth) says more about
| you than what NZ might need...
| jstanley wrote:
| The menstruation one isn't researching menstruation. It's
| researching "the possibilities of menstruation and
| perimenopause tracking apps for people with diverse embodied
| experiences".
|
| They're not even making the app. They're trying to find out
| if an app would be useful, for $870k NZD.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| All three of those seem like very useful areas of research to
| me. New Zealand benefits from better understanding physical and
| mental health of large communities.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Each of these are relatively tiny. 870k NZD is scarcely more
| than the average price of a home in NZ. As in many countries,
| the kinds of expenditures are absolutely dwarfed by military
| spending. In the case of New Zealand, that's about 5B NZD. I
| suspect if we go line by line through their budget, we'll find
| plenty of questionable expenses that could pay for hundreds of
| social science studies.
| peatmoss wrote:
| I didn't dig beyond what was reported in this article, but my
| suspicion is that economic research will be excluded from these
| cuts. Assuming that to be true, that is where I'd expect to see a
| lot of social sciences research to be carried out.
|
| Some disciplines in the social sciences in recent years have
| taken a pretty hard turn towards qualitative methods and
| epistemologies that are either misaligned with or explicitly
| reject the scientific method.
|
| I think dropping funding for social sciences is a mistake, but at
| the same time (and I'm tipping my hand a bit here), the social
| sciences might benefit from a renewed emphasis on methods that
| can result in generalizable findings. I've read some case study /
| qualitative papers in recent years that, uh, do not give me the
| strong impression that some parts of the academy are serious
| stewards of the funding society entrusts to them.
|
| In short, I think a correction is warranted, but I hate to see it
| happen as part of a charged ideological / political process.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Yeah even a sizable fraction of economic research is not
| credible enough to take at face value... let alone social
| sciences in general.
| bb86754 wrote:
| Agreed. But I don't think economics is off the hook here
| either. To me it's the social science that best masquerades as
| a "hard" science while still make huge jumps in logic that are
| rarely justified in the papers I've read.
| peatmoss wrote:
| I studiously avoided making a normative statement that
| economics _should_ take over this role. Any personal
| preferences I have here are separate from my beliefs about
| what I _predict_ to happen. :-)
|
| I ~agree with you about the quality of econ papers. In some
| cases, I see the quantitative facility of econ papers as
| being better than similar studies executed by e.g.
| sociologists. But in some cases, flashy quant skills are used
| to distract from more fundamental issues.
|
| Assuming my prediction that social science research shifts to
| econ comes to pass, I think the natural pressure will be to
| drag econ's present quality bar downward.
| graemep wrote:
| > But in some cases, flashy quant skills are used to
| distract from more fundamental issues.
|
| I agree, I sometimes thing economists like quantitive
| approaches because it makes them feel like "real
| scientists" and numbers have an air of credibility.
|
| It look a lot of arguing to let my MSc dissertation
| supervisor let me do one on financial theory (which I am
| good at) rather than econometrics (which i struggled with).
| Tarsul wrote:
| Love your use of ~ in "~agree". Such a nice shortcut. Might
| steal that :D
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| While we're bashing economics, something I truly miss is that
| no new high level economic systems are being discussed
| prominently. As important as fusion in physics or cancer
| treatment in medicine, we badly need to explore and discuss
| something beyond the heavily ideologized systems of
| capitalism, communism and feed this to politics to
| communicate these potential options to the voters. Say,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism, which is old and half
| forgotten. It appears as economics is kind of muted, students
| and professors beholden to an ideology themselves or feeling
| the need to appease potential employers who are usually
| politicized institutions with no room for intellectual
| curiosity. What else remains in terms of practical economics
| besides determining the inflation rate (oops, that one is
| also politicized)?
| amelius wrote:
| Yes economic system is highly flawed.
|
| Elon Musk owns $400B. Earth will become uninhabitable after
| 1 billion years from now (when the heat of the Sun becomes
| too large for us).
|
| This means that Musk, if he lived that long, would be able
| to spend $400 every day until the death of all life on
| Earth.
|
| This is 15 times the current average daily income
| worldwide.
|
| If this is not insane, then what is?
| narrator wrote:
| You're looking at the world as a poor person. If you had
| Elon's brilliance you'd probably quit after you made $5
| million dollars or so and definitely after you sold Zip2
| back in the 1990s and spent the rest of your life on the
| beach. The only reason he's still working as hard as he
| does is not because he wants to spend that on himself. He
| wants the glory of going to Mars and having a positive
| impact on humanity and that requires control of the
| activities of large companies like SpaceX, etc. which
| requires ownership stakes in those companies that are
| valued in the billions.
|
| One of the reasons that he campaigned so hard for Trump
| is that Kamala's proposed wealth taxes on unrealized
| capital gains were going to take his companies from him
| and he'd have to sell to Vanguard or Blackrock, who would
| give control of the companies to Boeing-tier mediocrity
| which would mean that we'd never get to Mars. There have
| been so many companies where the founders sold out and
| retired because they had enough money and they got bought
| by big conglomerates who destroyed those companies with
| mediocre management and neglect. This is the great thing
| about Elon, he just keeps building and leveraging all
| that money to create bigger and bigger companies using
| his creativity and management ability to achieve his goal
| of launching an era of space exploration.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| We've already sent probes to Mars. There's no reason to
| send people other than to show we can. It's extremely
| uninhabitable...like Antarctica is a paradise in
| comparison with water, air, and a lack of radiation. We
| have nowhere near the technology to terraform Mars
| either. I guess you could dig someone a cave and send
| them some nuclear batteries and a bunch of prepackaged
| food, but what's the point?
|
| Elon is an oligarch plain and simple. SpaceX is
| impressive, and I'm a big fan of NASA's research, but
| let's look past the marketing of him trying to save the
| human species or whatever.
|
| I do think humanity may have to settle another world (or
| move to a post-biological existence where we can just
| park our satellite brains around a star for energy), but
| this is going to take a lot of scientific advancement
| over many centuries. Elon's plan would make a lot more
| sense if Mars was an Earth 2.0 and we just needed to move
| a bunch of people there, but it's not and even if we do
| find something really close to Earth with JWST, it would
| take centuries to get there. In short, our best approach
| is to save the planet we already have and continue
| funding scientific research.
| kiba wrote:
| _We 've already sent probes to Mars. There's no reason to
| send people other than to show we can. It's extremely
| uninhabitable...like Antarctica is a paradise in
| comparison with water, air, and a lack of radiation. We
| have nowhere near the technology to terraform Mars
| either. I guess you could dig someone a cave and send
| them some nuclear batteries and a bunch of prepackaged
| food, but what's the point?_
|
| People always look at this with hard nosed pragmatism.
| That's the wrong lens to view Space colonization. It's a
| vision and a dream.
| someuser2345 wrote:
| > There's no reason to send people other than to show we
| can.
|
| That is true for lots of other things. What's the point
| of building the Taj Mahal? What's the point of running a
| marathon? What's the point of getting the world record
| for the longest time spent underwater? Just to show that
| we can.
|
| > Elon's plan would make a lot more sense if Mars was an
| Earth 2.0 and we just needed to move a bunch of people
| there, but it's not and even if we do find something
| really close to Earth with JWST, it would take centuries
| to get there.
|
| I agree that we probably won't be able to have a viable
| Mars colony in our lifetime. However, I do think that the
| pursuit of that goal will result in lots of useful
| inventions; just look at what SpaceX has accomplished
| already.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Musk aside, I think there is huge value in knowing how to
| sustain human life indefinitely without the earth. In
| fact, I think its inevitable that humans will need to
| leave earth at some point in our future.
|
| It may simply be as a result of population and
| overcrowding, it may be to flee war and persecution. I
| think there is a small chance we have already made
| changes to our atmosphere that make life here
| incompatible with humans.
|
| Its possible that within just a few hundred years, humans
| need to live entirely within climate controlled
| environments. If I had Musk level money I would be
| working on this now.
| macintux wrote:
| That is a wildly generous interpretation of his behavior
| and motivations.
| fdschoeneman wrote:
| It's the most likely interpretation toe because it fits
| the known facts.
|
| Ungenerous interpretations don't make sense and don't fit
| the known facts.
|
| Musk isn't hiding his intentions. He's blasting them. He
| wants to make humans an interplanetary species. He wants
| his name to be associated with that for millennia. I
| don't see anything wrong with that and have trouble
| understanding why people hate him souch for it.
| Zanfa wrote:
| > Musk isn't hiding his intentions. He's blasting them.
| He wants to make humans an interplanetary species.
|
| What people say about what and why they do things and why
| they actually do them are rarely correlated.
| kiba wrote:
| That is not what people hate Musk for. They hate Musk
| because he's that unlikable.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| Some people don't want to be an interplanetary species at
| the expense of more urgent priorities; to them it isn't
| compelling that an ambitious man wants to immortalize
| himself using concepts from the science fiction of his
| childhood
| hnbad wrote:
| > He wants to make humans an interplanetary species.
|
| Sure, that's one of the things he wants to do. But his
| actions don't demonstrate that this is the primary thing
| he wants to do.
|
| You can't build a sustainable colony on Mars without
| establishing a sustainable supply line until it reaches
| self-sustainability. Given what we know about Mars at
| this point, we're easily centuries away from achieving
| self-sustainability on Mars even if we fully committed to
| this goal right away. This means it's not just a cool
| tech problem, it's a logistics problem and logistics are
| boring. There's a reason Musk has repeatedly said he
| merely wants to make it _possible_ to colonize Mars, not
| that he wants to do it. He 's also smart enough that he
| doesn't want to go there himself because he knows it
| would mean dying in a barren wasteland even in the best
| of cases. Musk doesn't want to do the digging, he wants
| to sell the shovels.
|
| If we want to build up the supply lines to colonize Mars,
| we at the very least need not just cool space tech but
| also boring stuff like a permanent supply base on the
| moon. But the moon has become boring ever since the end
| of the Space Race and building a supply post on the moon
| is - again - a boring logistics problem first, not a cool
| space tech problem. And because it's boring, it's far
| easier to see the big problems with it (all of which not
| only hold true for Mars but also do so to a much greater
| scale): any supply lines you build to the moon require
| supply lines on Earth first.
|
| If you want sustainable supply lines in space, you have
| to build sustainable supply lines on Earth. And to have
| sustainable supply lines on Earth for space, you need a
| sustainable source of surplus resources. And even if we
| ignore the social implications of generating such
| "surplus" when millions live in abject poverty, this can
| only work if we prevent climate change from spiraling
| further out of control because it's difficult to run a
| business when the economy has collapsed and even more
| difficult to get work done when all the workers keep
| dying (presumably dying consumers are a smaller issue if
| we only consider valuations not revenue).
|
| Tesla initially produced four reasonably mass market EVs
| but the most Musk contributed to them personally concept-
| wise was the childish naming scheme to spell out "S3XY".
| This was followed by an electric semi that is largely
| forgotten after the initial hype and the Cybertruck which
| literally isn't considered road-safe in most countries
| and hardly qualifies as "mass market". Despite promising
| FSD for years, the best Tesla has demonstrated since were
| robotaxi concept cars that again don't seem to have been
| designed with mass market use in mind. As for FSD and
| robotics: again Tesla hasn't yet demonstrated any ability
| to come anywhere near Musk's promises. So contrary to the
| popular narrative Tesla is not "building an EV future" -
| not that it would be helping address climate change even
| if it were because that would require a focus on mass
| transport.
|
| Which brings us to the next thing: the Boring company.
| Again Musk's narrative sold this as an important step in
| preparing for Mars because if water is underground on
| Mars we'll need a lot of tunnels but the company is best
| known for its many projects announced and subsequently
| cancelled or abandoned across the US - and the Las Vegas
| "Loop" which is a claustrophobic underground shuttle
| service with gamer lights and mostly exists because Elon
| Musk hyped the idea of a (high speed vacuum tunnel)
| "Hyperloop" to - and it's worth pointing out that he has
| literally admitted as much since - preempt plans to build
| a public highspeed rail system.
|
| What else was part of the narrative? Oh, right:
| SolarCity. Again Musk bought a company and claimed it was
| part of a plan to colonize Mars because we don't have
| fossil fuels on Mars so certainly the future must be
| solar - and of course those Tesla Superchargers need to
| be charged somehow, too. The company was eventually
| folded into Tesla (as Tesla Energy) and has shifted from
| mass market solar panels to making most of its revenue
| from batteries and selling primarily to big customers.
|
| SpaceX at least largely does what it says on the tin if
| you ignore that it mostly still exists because the US
| government all but abandoned direct investments in space
| travel and SpaceX managed to collect a number of
| lucrative government contracts by controlling a de-facto
| monopoly position. Starlink also mostly seems to exist to
| exert an uncomfortable amount of political power over the
| governments that have bought into it (as the Ukrainians
| had to find out the hard way).
|
| Elon Musk has an almost obsessive hyperfixation on the
| letter X and the idea of colonizing Mars, yes - he's
| autistic. But that doesn't mean everything he does he
| does in service of that goal. It doesn't even mean he
| actively contributes towards that goal in a meaningful or
| well thought out manner. It doesn't explain why he
| decided to father an uncomfortable number of children
| with an even more uncomfortable selection of partners
| (especially when it comes to business partners and
| employees) or why he's extremely selective in which token
| child he decides to shower with praise and attention (if
| not his own then at least in public appearances). It
| doesn't explain why he actively sabotages more climate
| friendly public mass transit projects to favor
| unsustainable individualized transport deliberately
| designed in such a way it can not be accessible to most.
| It doesn't explain why he decided to make a great show of
| "leaving the left" and presenting himself as "anti-woke"
| just in time when a big hit piece on him was about to be
| published because of his inappropriate behavior toward
| women. Etc etc. None of that logically follows from the
| goal of making humans an interplanetary species except in
| the most trivial of ways (i.e. stranding a person on Mars
| would _technically_ make humans an interplanetary species
| for as long as that person survives).
|
| The hate (if you just want to lump all criticism or
| distate into that label) Elon Musk gets is not "because
| he wants to make humans an interplanetary species", he
| gets it for the things he _does_. And in many cases what
| he does is actively damaging to his stated goal.
| scottLobster wrote:
| Yeah, all his antics in buying/posting on Twitter and his
| pushing of the Cybertruck, BS androids, "hyperloop" etc
| are totally part of a grand mission in the service of
| mankind, and not the acts of an obsessive, socially mal-
| adjusted narcissist.
|
| Gwynne Shotwell is more responsible for SpaceX's
| operational success than Elon will ever be, she's clearly
| done a great job of managing up and letting him take the
| "glory" he so desperately yearns for, but all he really
| provided was the initial vision and money. Not to
| understate that contribution, but his supposed
| "brilliance" is pure marketing. We've seen what happens
| we he actually gets meaningful operational control of a
| company (Twitter) and a product (Cybertruck), and it
| isn't good.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| ROFL.
|
| Thanks for taking up the mantle for the poor
| multibillionaires. The poor guy is homeless, after all.
|
| There's nothing more hilarious than folks devoting time
| to simp for people like this.
| hilux wrote:
| Or maybe he just likes the attention, and he likes
| "winning," as measured by the size of his wealth.
|
| I can think of a prominent politician with the same
| qualities.
| d3ckard wrote:
| Except he does not. His assets are valued at 400B,
| provided that he pinky swears not to try to actually sell
| them, in which case they will be worth much, much less.
| pyrale wrote:
| Why is that?
|
| Just because an orderly liquidation would take some time
| does not mean it would be impossible for him to sell.
|
| As a case in point, when he decided to invest in twitter,
| he was able to use his wealth pretty easily.
| Cpoll wrote:
| He can only share his shares and assets at 400B if the
| market thinks they're worth 400B, and if there are enough
| buyers for all 400B. And once he starts selling, the
| market might re-evaluate the worth of the shares.
|
| Isn't Twitter a good counterpoint? I vaguely recall Musk
| had a hard time liquidating shares to buy it?
| pyrale wrote:
| That is the meaning of what I call orderly liquidation.
| Sales are usually structured in order not to crash the
| market.
|
| That being said, just because you need to structure a big
| sale does not mean it can not be done, or that you can
| not leverage your asset to have cash available at short
| notice. For instance, a loan with your actions as
| collateral will let you structure your divestment over
| years for a very moderate price.
|
| Again, what I'm describing is not science fiction, it's
| litterally what happened with twitter.
|
| Imo it would be a harder challenge to find valuable stuff
| to buy than to divest orderly.
|
| > Isn't Twitter a good counterpoint? I vaguely recall
| Musk had a hard time liquidating shares to buy it?
|
| From what I remember, the issue was more along the lines
| of him making an offer without thinking it would be
| accepted, and then be under the gun because he was not
| prepared. Even then, he eventually found a reasonable
| financing scheme.
| Ntrails wrote:
| Selling a billion dollars of amazon via blocks etc with
| limited market impact? Probably doable if not super
| cheap.
|
| 3-400b? No way. There isn't capacity, you would cause a
| massive dip in prices. The timelines you would have to
| exit over would be very long, so disclosure also causes
| market reaction.
|
| Loans work to an extent, but you get risk adjusted and eg
| 1bn of amazon stock is pretty low risk whilst 100bn is
| high risk. Concentration/size vs market cap and adv
| matter.
|
| You can do it all, at a price, but it would be a lot
| lower than the current stock price for obvious reasons
| pyrale wrote:
| > The timelines you would have to exit over would be very
| long, so disclosure also causes market reaction.
|
| Your claim seems to revolve around the idea that a fire-
| sale would crash the market, but no one is arguing for a
| fire-sale.
|
| Again, structuring a sale over a long time span isn't a
| big issue, since you can get cash now by selling the
| future revenue.
|
| The real hard question would be to find $400bn worth of
| stuff to buy.
| Ntrails wrote:
| If Bezos declared he was selling _all_ his amazon stock -
| the market would react badly. Both due to the scale of
| inventory and the implications of his alignment and
| investment.
|
| Dimon sold some stock and it was front page news, and it
| wasn't that much.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that he didn't liquidate $50bn in stock
| to get the money for buying twitter. (That $50bn includes
| the 20% capital gains tax, that leaves $40bn in cash)
| pyrale wrote:
| Yeah, that is my point: you don't need to fire-sell to
| get fast cash, you can just use your capital as
| collateral.
| croes wrote:
| That's why he uses these assets to borrow money
| superluserdo wrote:
| You're mixing up years and days there. It would be about
| $1 a day, not 400.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Somehow people making these sort of hypotheticals about
| billionaires spending or dispersing their money always
| make a mistake like this.
|
| _" Jeff Bezos has 300 billion dollars. There are 300
| million people in America, so he could give everybody a
| million dollars."_
|
| For fun, calculate how long the billionaires of America
| could fund America's social programs if they were taxed
| at 100%. If you ask people this, the off-the-cusp
| estimates are usually something like a thousand years, a
| century, some huge number like that...
| hnbad wrote:
| Sure but those hypotheticals are just poorly thought out
| ways to visualize the imbalance. Another way to do it
| would be saying "Jeff Bezos has 300 billion dollars, that
| is 300 thousand millions. There are 300 million people in
| America, so $1000 has been taken out of every American's
| share of the national wealth and reserved exclusively for
| Jeff Bezos". Repeat that for every billionaire in the US
| and you should be able to demonstrate quite the
| imbalance.
|
| Of course that assumes you think Earth's and society's
| (or at least the US's and Americans') resources should
| exist for all humans (or Americans) and the ideal balance
| would be based on as little as one needs and as much as
| one can contribute, i.e. literally how early human
| communities operated and how human communities still
| often operate outside economical contexts (e.g. after a
| natural disaster). You can say that model doesn't scale
| but I don't see a good argument for why that should be a
| reason to use a completely different model unless you're
| literally among the few people it disproportionately
| benefits (if you ignore how ruinous it usually is to them
| too at a human and interpersonal level because of how
| much it alienates them from almost anyone else around
| them).
| naming_the_user wrote:
| That's also misusing maths though because Amazon is a
| global company so really you should divide by 8 billion
| or at least a couple of billion.
|
| As a Brit I think I've derived significantly more than
| $1000 in value through Amazon's existence as compared
| with the status quo beforehand, and that's exclusively
| counting the shopping part and not anything else they do.
| You can ask the question about whether it would have
| happened anyway in a communist paradise or whether Bezos
| gets the correct percentage of the reward but I mean, it
| actually is a very useful thing.
|
| Similarly with Apple and Google and so on. These
| companies make things that people for the most part
| choose to use.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| This whole argument also assumes there is something
| called "Americas National Wealth" and that its a zero sum
| game where there is x dollars to be distributed around to
| everybody.
|
| Capitalism is not a zero sum game, and people can choose
| to turn effort into wealth or they can choose to sit
| around and do nothing.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| Yeah. I feel as if there's a (small, but growing?) group
| of people out there who just sort of see, ok, well,
| everyone isn't as well off as I think they should be, so
| those who are doing well must just be hoarding
| everything. Which really just doesn't make sense at all.
|
| It's usually based on nothing other than pure vibes.
|
| It could theoretically be true if e.g. some billionaire
| just decided to buy up a load of houses and leave them
| empty just to piss people off, but whilst theoretically
| they probably could do this (e.g. if I back of the
| envelope it, Elon actually has enough net worth to offer
| everyone in my hometown double the market value of their
| house and then just leave them to rot without even
| renting them out), no-one actually does.
| kiba wrote:
| Pretty sure it's not going to be 300 billion dollars if
| you try to cash it out.
| JohnCClarke wrote:
| that's a thousand dollars each
|
| Even in this populist age, math still counts.
| lupusreal wrote:
| It was an illustrative example of the way people botch
| this sort of math problem. Steve Mould has a video about
| it IIRC.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| If you couldn't more than $400 a day then nothing great
| would ever get done.
| fdschoeneman wrote:
| In answer to your question, it is irrelevant. It doesn't
| matter how much money musk has, or you have, or bezos
| has, or the government has. What matters is where that
| money is invested.
|
| If musk was using his money to bang hookers on solid gold
| yachts, fine, complain about it. But he isn't. He doesn't
| even own a house.
|
| Stop worrying about another man's dollar and start
| worrying about being a better and less covetous person.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Wasting his money on luxuries would be preferable to
| destroying Twitter and funding Trump's reelection.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| Cut to Musk tweeting "no fear, buy the dip!" as he
| unloads some memecoin.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yacht makers and hookers need customers too.
| dmonitor wrote:
| Elon is clearly using his fortune to enact wide scale
| societal change. He's currently chilling in the
| president-elect's house and chatting with foreign
| leaders. How Elon spends his money shouldn't be my
| problem, but he's dead set on making it that.
| shikon7 wrote:
| That's why he works so hard to colonize other planets.
| kiba wrote:
| I think access to that much capital as assess to
| strategic resource, not as wealth for individuals.
|
| At that level of wealth, it doesn't make sense to think
| about fancy cars and mansions and living an extravagant
| and luxurious lifestyle. At that point, you got it made.
|
| However, if you're talking about building something
| meaningful, that's a different matter entirely. That
| requires far more capitals than what is required to
| sustain a person indefinitely. There are shows that I
| would love to revive and reboot, such as Stargate. There
| are researches I want to do or fund, such as research
| into 3D printing, or do long term research grants so that
| people can do meaningful work.
|
| The money's not for living. It's for projects. If your
| personal projects don't require that much money, you can
| always give it away to fund other people's projects.
| rickydroll wrote:
| I agree with you that great wealth can be used to fund
| meaningful research and development. Unfortunately, as we
| have seen, great wealth is used to distort society to
| reinforce their ability to hold onto wealth.
| amelius wrote:
| But the article is about basic research. Do you think
| that we can cut basic research just so that one rich guy
| can have projects?
| kiba wrote:
| I was commenting on people bemoaning about billionaires
| being too rich, with the implication that billionaires
| shouldn't ever need that much money.
|
| I don't necessarily agree with the idea of cutting basic
| research programs and how it's actually structured(short
| termism, prioritizing novel results over building solid
| foundation, etc).
| goatlover wrote:
| The (US) economic system isn't economics, anymore than
| the (US) political system is political science. You're
| conflating the instance of one particular system with the
| study of those systems. You're also confusing economists
| with actual representatives who pass laws. Might as well
| blame climatologists for climate change.
| efitz wrote:
| This is not true and is a very common misunderstanding of
| modern wealth.
|
| Elon Musk owns hundreds of billions worth of stock.
|
| First, the value of those stocks varies from day to day.
| He can gain or lose billions of dollars in "net worth" on
| any given business day.
|
| Second, he is not free to sell that stock however and
| whenever he wants; he has to get approval from the boards
| of his various companies and is limited in the timing and
| amounts he can sell. Additionally, selling large amounts
| of stock causes the price to drop, AND dilutes his
| ownership in, and therefore control of, those companies.
|
| I think a lot of people have this stupid idea of Scrooge
| McDuck swimming in pool of cash, when they think about
| billionaires. That's not how it works, for most
| billionaires (I'm not sure about middle eastern oil
| royalty).
|
| In reality, businessman billionaires have most of their
| wealth in stock, and it is not liquid, and they borrow
| against the stock (i.e. use the stock as collateral for
| personal loans) and sell small percentages of it to
| finance their lifestyles.
|
| If you created a company, and it became wildly
| successful, and it was publicly traded, who should "own"
| the company? Should you be forced to divest, and
| therefore cede control to people who had no involvement
| in the company's initial success? Is that good for
| founders or for companies? How does it benefit society?
|
| Also note that profitability influences stock price, so
| taking away control from the people who made a company
| profitable, has a high likelihood of making the company
| less profitable, which in turn will almost certainly
| result in each stockholder becoming poorer. Remember that
| most stockholders aren't Elon Musks, they're John Q.
| Publics with a 401(k).
| 1832 wrote:
| > Also note that profitability influences stock price, so
| taking away control from the people who made a company
| profitable, has a high likelihood of making the company
| less profitable, which in turn will almost certainly
| result in each stockholder becoming poorer.
|
| Absolute clown
| abeppu wrote:
| People love to talk about ideology, but is what what
| economics should be about? Every major economy on the
| planet is a mixed economy. In China, government expenditure
| and revenue are 33.1% and 25.5% of GDP respectively. In the
| US, the corresponding percentages are 38.5% and 32.9%.
| Neither totally free markets nor planned economies seem to
| work, and empirical research obliges economists to look at
| the economies we actually have.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governme
| n...
|
| I think Piketty does kind of do what you're talking about
| -- and though he makes a good case, I think when he argues
| for concepts like universal inheritance, that's more an act
| of political advocacy than economic scholarship. It's for
| the economist qua economist to study/analyze the conditions
| under which the rich get richer, or where class mobility
| decreases, etc -- but it's up to people and governments to
| choose what they want society to look like.
| felixgallo wrote:
| can you provide an example of a discipline that has taken a
| hard turn towards rejecting the scientific method?
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| This. Actually, I've observed the opposite way more often in
| EU academic circles: Humanistic studies parroting STEM
| quantitative approaches in fields where it's useless or even
| ridiculous - Think the "poetic mathematical analysis" at the
| beginning of _Dead Poets Society_.
| peatmoss wrote:
| Geography, sociology, anthropology for starters. Take a read
| about postmodern epistemologies. See how many papers draw on
| "pure theory". I even saw this in my required coursework
| prior to dropping out of a PhD in urban planning.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The parent post talks about "recent years". Postmodernism
| being in any way dominant hasn't been a thing (in American
| universities) since the late 80s or maybe early 90s. The
| common approach these days is theoretical pluralism.
| felixgallo wrote:
| can you point to a specific example of a geography program
| turning away from the scientific method? I've seen
| postmodernism and deconstructivism applied to architecture
| and rhetoric, but as convoluted and ultimately non-
| explanatory as I found them, they were still based in the
| formal ideas of cause and effect, and experimental
| approaches to theories.
| peatmoss wrote:
| Without diving into my personal experiences with a
| specific department, I invite you to take a look at
| google scholar for peer reviewed publications grounded in
| theory approaches such as queer theory and critical
| theory in geographic studies: https://scholar.google.com/
| scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C48&q=que...
|
| Also please note that me calling these theories non-
| scientific is not a colloquial dig at them. I'm speaking
| precisely that the literature contributing to these
| theories explicitly and frequently opposes the scientific
| method as a tool of oppression. Even though I believe in
| (bounded) rationality, I do agree with this viewpoint in
| part. Science, as practiced by fallible humans, can be
| used for bad things! But, where I disagree with critical
| theory and its children, is that this somehow
| delegitimizes scientific epistemology.
|
| A specific publication I remember reading years ago as an
| assigned reading cites, as a limitation of the paper
| their use of the Cartesian plane in mapping, as the
| Cartesian plane is incompatible with queer theory: https:
| //www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/000456007017340...
| glitchc wrote:
| Psychology.
| xdennis wrote:
| I first learned about this from Richard Dawkins, but
| apparently there's a push to consider Maori mythology as
| science: https://richarddawkins.net/2021/12/myths-do-not-
| belong-in-sc...
| harimau777 wrote:
| Are you referring to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81tauranga_M%C4%81ori
|
| If so, then it seems to me that there's much more nuance
| than "mythology as science". Certainly there are aspects of
| traditional knowledge that deal directly with facts and
| therefore could be in conflict with science. However,
| that's not the same as recognizing that different cultures
| can have different ways of understanding and thinking about
| the world. Understanding those different ways of
| understanding could be a valuable tool in allowing society
| to develop creative approaches to problems.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Science did not spring forth like athena from zeus' head.
|
| In their historical context, tools that we would now
| consider to be wildly unscientific (like oracles to gods or
| various alchemical practices) were intertwined deeply with
| scientific practice. It is not unreasonable to draw these
| kinds of connections in research. I know some people doing
| interesting work connecting ancient cipher technology with
| various divination techniques.
|
| Just because these techniques don't work doesn't mean that
| they aren't relevant to understanding why things are the
| way they are today.
| zamfi wrote:
| Hmm. Are you familiar enough with research in economics, or the
| hard sciences, to say that all the work in those disciplines
| lack an emphasis on "generalizable findings"?
|
| It feels like epistemic weaksauce to claim that entire fields
| explicitly reject the goal of generalizable knowledge because
| they question or reject "the scientific method" on the basis of
| "I've read some case study / qualitative papers".
| mistermann wrote:
| The notion that rejecting the scientific method is
| necessarily bad thing is epistemically unsound, and a rather
| provocative topic.
| peatmoss wrote:
| And yet I did not state this, and it seems you're rounding
| my position to an easier one to dismiss.
|
| I don't reject non-scientific scholarship. But I see the
| focus in some disciplines a little like twinkies and soda:
| a bit of them can be fine and maybe even be good in some
| circumstances (brings joy; maybe as a recovery item for
| some diabetic conditions). But my feeling is that some of
| these disciplines have indexed a bit too much on twinkie
| and soda.
| mistermann wrote:
| I think we are very much on the same general page!
| peatmoss wrote:
| Ah, I think I misread the intent of what you wrote--
| apologies!
| goatlover wrote:
| Do you have another method in mind that is epistemically
| sound other than the scientific method?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| It is always amazing to me how many people are willing to say
| "wow this entire academic field is just garbage and the
| researchers are making some incredibly childish error" based
| on what seems just entirely like vibes.
|
| Psych is getting a brunt of this because they have actually
| done a _good_ thing and funded replication studies, which
| naturally will produce a bunch of "this fails to replicate"
| findings. So then you get headlines talking about the
| replication crisis in psych and then people who maybe took a
| single class in college a decade ago dismiss the entire field
| as bogus.
|
| I invite such people to go speak with some CS academics for a
| better understanding of the mess in our own field.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > turn towards qualitative methods and epistemologies that are
| either misaligned with or explicitly reject the scientific
| method.
|
| At least you can see their questionable method upfront, and can
| disagree with it.
|
| Economics is worse: it has become completely quantitative, with
| sophisticated mathematics. I've heard the approach referred to
| as 'physics envy'
|
| It appears unapproachable to a non-expert and authoritative.
| But it's not like physics
|
| It's conclusions are often catastrophically wrong because all
| the mathematics relies on shaky qualitative assumptions: people
| are perfectly rational, etc.
|
| For example we have published economic research that forecasts
| that severe climate change will only damage global GDP by 1%.
|
| They conclude that farming productivity will be reduced by 25%
| and farming is 4% of global GDP, so it's 1%. Then they model
| some effect on the consumer because food prices go up.
|
| It does not occur to the authors to model impact of physical
| result of that, which is, famine and political instability that
| comes with it.
| jt2190 wrote:
| Maybe I'm wired differently, but what you're describing
| sounds like _estimation_ , so I'd expect that they've made
| some underlying assumptions, foresight being imperfect and
| all.
|
| I'm unclear what you're arguing for here, that we should not
| attempt to estimate because we have to make some assumptions
| about future events? Or is it that the estimators in this
| case should have used different assumptions? Or is it that
| they should also be estimating the potential for famines and
| political instability (which maybe they don't feel qualified
| to do?)
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| The assertion is that a 25% reduction in farming capacity
| should have a nonzero negative effect on non-farming gdp,
| due to people not being fed
| jt2190 wrote:
| That assertion is due to the incorrect assumption that we
| can't feed everyone on the planet if farming becomes less
| productive than it is today, and ignores that we
| currently produce very large food surpluses.
|
| > They conclude that farming productivity will be reduced
| by 25% and farming is 4% of global GDP, so it's 1%. Then
| they model some effect on the consumer because food
| prices go up.
|
| > It does not occur to the authors to model impact of
| physical result of that, which is, famine and political
| instability that comes with it.
| stanfordkid wrote:
| This is the great illustration of the hokey thinking that
| happens in economics. They don't focus on modeling humans as
| agentic systems. What happens if GDP is pushed to 1000%,
| 10,000%? When there is so much agricultural production that
| food is free? How does that affect geopolitics, human social
| values and demands? It's clear to me the models completely
| breakdown and are really only epsilon valid (e.g okay for
| modeling small, but not catastrophic pertrubations)
| confidantlake wrote:
| It is not just that they are wrong, they are intentionally
| wrong. Someone wants that 1% number and economists will
| happily deliver. If someone wanted to pay for a study saying
| it would affect gdp by 50% they would get it.
| lazystar wrote:
| > I hate to see [a correction] happen as part of a charged
| ideological / political process.
|
| Isn't that any correction? changing the status quo is about as
| purely political as it gets
| ninth_ant wrote:
| All changes to the status quo can have political
| repercussions. But there is a difference between a change
| that is a byproduct of someone trying to do what is right in
| a given situation vs a change that someone is making directly
| relating to external ideological processes.
|
| For this example, was the decision made by academics who
| analyzed the situation and felt that some aspects of study
| were underfunded? Or was it outsiders who entered the process
| with a specific objective and didn't bother with the details
| so long as their ideological objectives were achieved?
|
| Both are "politics" but they aren't the same.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| The social sciences are not science and good riddance to them.
|
| They are religious rituals with only the trappings of the
| scientific method. These rituals are often purely performative,
| but the outcomes can be useful for effecting political goals,
| as the studies have historically given authoritative weight to
| bureaucrats and their designs.
|
| The ruse is failing though, and I think New Zealand's actions
| here could be evidence of this trend. No longer is "studies
| show..." a sufficient enough deception for enacting political
| ends. People are demanding sounder reasoning in politics than
| what Scientism has to offer.
|
| Most invocations of _Scientism_ are directed at these social
| sciences, due to its egregiousness.
| MiguelX413 wrote:
| Economics is the worst social science, an economist is never
| considered wrong, only of a different "school of economics".
| Economists speak as if they have authority and as if their
| field is objective, but at the same time have those "schools".
| Is there such a thing as an unideological economist?
| orange_joe wrote:
| I think your idea of economics is more informed by online
| debate than actual research. Contemporary economists mostly
| try to articulate things through econometrics, which is a
| fairly data driven field. It's fair if you have issues with
| the rigor of these studies but a discussion of schools is
| fairly off base from my experience.
| LargeWu wrote:
| Correct. A graduate degree in economics is much closer to
| an applied math degree than something that resembles what
| we would traditionally consider social sciences.
| lordnacho wrote:
| To me it seemed like there were two kinds of economics
| degrees.
|
| One was a math degree pretending to be about the economy.
| At the graduate level, it could be a science: actually
| going out and measuring things with some pretty hardcore
| tools, and then publishing a theory that nobody who ought
| to use it (AKA politicians) would ever be able to
| understand. There's real findings here on stuff like the
| minimum wage, which you'd think someone would care about.
|
| It could also be just some extremely complicated
| derivations that pretended they were related to the real
| world, but with ridiculously mathematical assumptions.
|
| The other was a softie-softie "talk about how the world
| works" degree with barely any mathematics, just lots of
| readings and essays.
|
| You could choose what you wanted to do.
|
| This is why I've never quite figured out how to assess
| economics graduates. I don't know what they got up to.
| They also seem to do some very disparate kinds of work
| once they (I guess I should say "we") graduate.
| xp84 wrote:
| > You could choose what you wanted to do.
|
| Interesting. Did students choose by selecting different
| institutions with different ideas of what should go into
| that degree, or is there very wide flexibility in course
| requirements?
| lordnacho wrote:
| Different courses at the same institution
| thefaux wrote:
| My objection is to the idea that everything true and
| important can be captured in metrics and quantitatively
| modeled. Then there is the fact that even to the extent
| that things like macroeconomics can be modeled (which is
| never at a level of accuracy that would be accepted in any
| scientific discipline), it still often fails to capture the
| social/political dynamics of the moment such that the
| theory matches felt experience. I believe that economics
| has largely captured power in social science by essentially
| stealing scientific authority and falsely claiming it as
| their own. Then they dismiss other fields of social inquiry
| as soft and unworthy of equal status even though their own
| insights are often of lesser value than the supposedly soft
| social sciences.
| peatmoss wrote:
| I'm an acolyte in the church of bounded rationality and
| the fallibility of institutions that practice science.
|
| I studied journalism as an undergraduate, and my beliefs
| here are like in journalism. Objectivity is impossible,
| like a Platonic ideal. But, it's an excellent thing to
| strive for. "Fuck it, it's impossible" is the wrong
| answer in my opinion.
|
| Qualitative methods and pure theory scholarship have
| their place, but most _useful_ qualitative research at
| least hints at some testable hypotheses. I feel that an
| underemphasis on generalizability is what happens when
| disciplines give up. And at worse, theory-based
| scholarship as it 's applied in some social sciences is
| really no better than really obtusely worded political
| punditry.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Exact numbers are easy to measure but not the only way to
| measure something. Data-driven is the new statistics but
| 10x worse because it has more sources of obfuscation, and
| bean counters (including super "smart" and analytically
| minded) obsess narrowly over models. Add ML/AI and you
| got an order of magnitude again.
|
| There's an impedance mismatch where we have enormous
| amounts of useless data and a small amount of useful
| data. Best we can do is use and create more of the
| _useful_ data instead of obsessing over P >.99 on
| something useless that will be misinterpreted anyway.
|
| The problem, in my view, isn't qualitative per se, but
| rather unfalsifiability. Ideology is when the solution is
| always more of the same no matter what the outcome is.
| Communism/socialism and neoliberalism all fall in this
| category. I believe this holds true if you go more
| academic into Keynesianism and say Chicago school -
| models that have become truisms to their followers.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I studied journalism as an undergraduate_
|
| _Objectivity is impossible_
|
| These two statements are at opposition with one another.
|
| I was a journalist for 20 years, and any entry-level
| reporter can put together a completely objective story.
| It happens thousands of times a day. Unless you somehow
| derive bias in stories like "A woman died when her car
| hit a brick wall on Main Street."
|
| Saying objectivity is not possible is just an internet-
| age excuse for mental laziness.
| krapp wrote:
| >"A woman died when her car hit a brick wall on Main
| Street."
|
| Except no reporter would write this single sentence as a
| story.
|
| Please present an example story which is both realistic
| (could be published or broadcast as is) and also
| completely objective.
| MiguelX413 wrote:
| My idea of economics is based on people who are interviewed
| with "economist" written under their name when they're
| introduced on screen. Whether it be online or by mainstream
| news outlets, an economist that agreed with what the
| creator wants to convey is always easily found.
| goatlover wrote:
| But that's not the actual science, that's an economist
| giving opinions on a news show. You can find plenty of
| examples of physicists giving opinions on lots of things
| also. Go look on Sabine Hossenfelder's YT channel.
| consteval wrote:
| Data driven analytics is more or less useless if you're
| ideologically driven.
|
| At the end of the day all of our economists are raging
| capitalists, so they will always approach any data gathered
| from a capitalist perspective. They will purposefully
| ignore any other possibilities because they are literally
| incapable of thinking about them. It's not something
| they've ever considered or digested.
|
| It's a lot like being car-brained. It's why very smart
| people keep proposing trains with extra steps but never
| calling them trains - they can't. Their minds lack the
| ability to view transportation outside of a car-centric
| perspective.
|
| Similarly, these economists lack the part of their brain
| where they can examine economics in a non-capitalist
| perspective. This is despite the fact that there are zero
| capitalist countries on Earth. In the US alone, 40% of our
| GDP comes from government spending. Shh, don't tell the
| economists!
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| The funny thing is that all who enter the realm of politics
| magically become instant expert "economists".
|
| The UK's Rachel Reeves was suddenly falling over herself to
| associate any scrap of experience she's had with "economics"
| [0].
|
| All the actual scientists and hard business decision makers I
| know try to _distance_ themselves from such jibber-jabber.
|
| [0] https://order-order.com/2024/10/24/rachel-reeves-bank-
| econom...
| narrator wrote:
| Paul Romer of the New York Stern School of Business has
| talked about the crisis of identifiability[1] which makes
| most macroeconomics non-falsifiable and completely isolates
| economists from ever being wrong in their theories. He's
| likened this to the crisis with string theory in physics.
|
| [1] https://paulromer.net/the-trouble-with-macro/WP-
| Trouble.pdf
| AlanYx wrote:
| One of the stronger criticisms of Economics as a discipline
| is that double-blind reviewing of papers is uncommon, and
| there has been a trend in the past 25 years for the subset of
| Econ journals that did use double-blind reviewing to move
| away from it.
|
| Not being an economist, I was surprised to learn this. There
| are reasons for it, e.g., the prevalence of working papers in
| the field, but it promotes insularity of ideas and creates an
| uneven playing field for less well-known and connected
| researchers.
| confidantlake wrote:
| It makes no sense if you treat it as a science. It makes
| perfect sense if you treat it as a pr department for
| whichever government or group is funding it. Whether you are
| a 1890s industrialist or a 1920s Marxist there is an
| economist for you.
| axus wrote:
| It's certainly worthy of study. The whole ecosystem of a
| "science" might be bad at one point in time, and all the
| practitioners might be wrong, but one day in the future the
| field could "get it right"!
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _Economics is the worst social science, an economist is
| never considered wrong, only of a different "school of
| economics". Economists speak as if they have authority and as
| if their field is objective, but at the same time have those
| "schools". Is there such a thing as an unideological
| economist?_
|
| Economics is falsifiable.
|
| For example, a bunch of folks made a prediction ("currency
| debasement and inflation") when the US Federal reserve
| started QE:
|
| > _We believe the Federal Reserve's large-scale asset
| purchase plan (so-called "quantitative easing") should be
| reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan
| is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The
| planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and
| inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed's
| objective of promoting employment._
|
| * https://www.hoover.org/research/open-letter-ben-bernanke
|
| A bunch of other folks (e.g., Keynesians like Krugman) made a
| bunch of prediction as well. One group turned out right,
| another did not. Another experiment where one group predicted
| tax cuts would spur growth:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment
|
| Others predicted it would not, and were right. There was also
| sorts of folks talking that cutting government spending would
| spur growth, i.e., "expansionary austerity":
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansionary_fiscal_contracti
| o...
|
| Others predicted it would not, and turned out correct:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_D
| a...
|
| Amsterdam ended up running a bit of an 'experiment' on what
| happens when you tried banning houses owned by investors:
|
| * https://frw.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/3913/1/Master%20Thesis%
| 2...
|
| * https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4480261
|
| * Via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRqZBuu_Ers
|
| There _are_ "schools" that put forward various models that
| get it right more than wrong. The fact that some people
| ignore things for ideological purposes is not the fault of
| the field in general, or of those that actually try to get
| their models to match reality.
|
| In fact a lot of the time people _know_ that what they 're
| putting forward is wrong:
|
| > _Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for the
| presidency on a platform advocating for supply-side
| economics. During the 1980 Republican Party presidential
| primaries, George H. W. Bush had derided Reagan 's economic
| approach as "voodoo economics".[23][24] Following Reagan's
| election, the "trickle-down" reached wide circulation with
| the publication of "The Education of David Stockman" a
| December 1981 interview of Reagan's incoming Office of
| Management and Budget director David Stockman, in the
| magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the interview, Stockman
| expressed doubts about supply side economics, telling
| journalist William Greider that the Kemp-Roth Tax Cut was a
| way to rebrand a tax cut for the top income bracket to make
| it easier to pass into law.[25] Stockman said that "It's kind
| of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula
| was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle
| down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[25][26][27]_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-
| down_economics#Reagan_...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics
| fallingknife wrote:
| What incentive is there to fix it if funding isn't cut? And how
| else do you think funding can be cut that isn't a "charged
| ideological / political process"?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| tying all social science to economics, what's the worst that
| could happen
| greentxt wrote:
| >I hate to see it happen as part of a charged ideological /
| political process.
|
| Can it happen another way?
| confidantlake wrote:
| I suspect you are right that economics will survive cuts. Not
| that it is any more of a science but because it is basically a
| propaganda arm for the establishment. This is true whether that
| establishment is died in the wool Marxists or libertarian free
| market absolutists.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > Some disciplines in the social sciences in recent years have
| taken a pretty hard turn towards qualitative methods and
| epistemologies that are either misaligned with or explicitly
| reject the scientific method.
|
| Hard to see a social science field that fits this description
| better than economics though...
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _I think a correction is warranted, but I hate to see it
| happen as part of a charged ideological / political process._
|
| didn't the changes that you would like corrected happen as part
| of a charged ideological / political process?
| Hilift wrote:
| This is public/state controlled funding. Also it is reserving
| it for "research with economic benefits." New Zealand isn't a
| rich country. Also private entities can fund research. It is
| common in the US for chemical companies to fund grants. For
| example, to determine what chemicals are in breast milk.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/13/pfas-for...
|
| https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c06978
|
| https://www.acs.org/about/aboutacs/financial/overview.html
| asdfman123 wrote:
| > New Zealand isn't a rich country
|
| It's 23rd by GDP per capita, next to France
| bogantech wrote:
| > per capita
|
| So France is over 10x richer then
| autoexec wrote:
| > Also private entities can fund research. It is common in
| the US for chemical companies to fund grants.
|
| It's also common in the US for companies to fund research so
| that they can manipulate results to their benefit and/or to
| bury results showing that their products are harmful. One of
| the many nice things about publicly funded research is that
| its purpose isn't to increase sales/stock prices, advertise,
| or manipulate/hide the truth from the public.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > pretty hard turn towards qualitative methods
|
| How repeatable is the field of economics?
| timwaagh wrote:
| Love the decision tbh. Social science does not deserve money.
| There has been too much fraud going on and I'm not sure about the
| benefits compared to hard science or medical science. I do
| understand why this impacts Maori disproportionately but making
| this matter about race is unfair. we're talking about a very
| small number of researchers here. The average person of whichever
| race is only affected in the sense that his tax dollars are spent
| more effectively.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| We should scrap economics?
| nradov wrote:
| Maybe? Has it produced any actionable results? I mean the
| research results produced by economists aren't necessarily
| wrong, but since policy makers just ignore the research
| anyway then what's the point of funding it?
| result2vino wrote:
| Let's peel away facade of the rhetorical questions here and
| look at what you're actually saying. Now, a massive,
| MASSIVE [[citation needed]] is in order.
| nradov wrote:
| That's not how this works. The questions I asked were not
| rhetorical and almost entirely subjective. Citations
| aren't necessary.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| TBF, western economics is a joke compared to the other social
| sciences. It needs to be fused with sociology or political
| science to make a lick of sense.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _western economics is a joke compared to the other social
| sciences_
|
| Rejecting empirically-proven supply-demand pricing models
| (no DSGE, I'm talking supply chain models that predict end
| prices) because it's politically inconvenient is exactly
| the sort of nonsense the social sciences are criticised
| for.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > Rejecting empirically-proven
|
| I thought we were discussing science here? Get out of
| here. Go read some Hume.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _thought we were discussing science here? Get out of
| here. Go read some Hume_
|
| It's pointed phrasing, but it works. When we have
| overwhelming evidence for a phenomenon that has solid
| theoretical foundations, it's fair to say it's
| empirically proven. Not absolutely or mathematically
| proven. But if you've read Hume or even Popper, you
| already know that.
|
| The core point remains the case: a lot of economics is
| uncomfortable for some people (there isn't a strong
| partisan leaning to this tendency, in my experience) and
| so they come up with elaborate arguments for why that
| evidence should be discarded. The top comment illustrates
| this [1].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42408895
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > There has been too much fraud going on and I'm not sure about
| the benefits compared to hard science or medical science.
|
| Maybe you should have taken it in school when you had the
| chance.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Fwiw, I took psych101, sociology101 , and minored in
| philosophy.
|
| I learned very little, certainly learned more just reading
| the books than going to class. Class was largely useless.
| mintplant wrote:
| I'm surprised you didn't get anything out of psychology.
| The psych I took as an undergrad has been quite useful in
| my daily life.
| dgfitz wrote:
| How so?
|
| Philosophy helped me to think critically and find edge
| cases. Psych taught me about different parts of the brain
| and their functions. Soci taught me my professor was a
| giant fraud and the entire discipline was a 'solution'
| looking for a problem.
| ausbah wrote:
| you know the replication crisis in pretty much every discipline
| of science right? esp our industry's pet fav machine learning
| result2vino wrote:
| Very clearly back-solving from the side that you've bought into
| in whatever stupid petty pop science culture war is in at the
| moment. If you had a genuine familiarly with the replication
| crisis and fraud in academia you'd know that it's everywhere,
| EVERYWHERE, including whatever precious 'hard sciences' you
| find dear.
| demosthanos wrote:
| Wow. I disagree with your position on the merits and read
| through your replies to see if someone had provided an
| effective counterargument, but you really touched a nerve: it's
| straight ad hominem snark all the way down. So I guess I'll
| give honest engagement a shot.
|
| > I'm not sure about the benefits compared to hard science or
| medical science. ... we're talking about a very small number of
| researchers here. The average person of whichever race is only
| affected in the sense that his tax dollars are spent more
| effectively.
|
| If I'm understanding you, this is your main point: social
| sciences have a weaker return on investment than medical
| sciences (and presumably some others?). Here's a
| counterargument.
|
| There are some fields that study universal facts about biology
| or physics. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, these
| will largely yield similar results that can be applied
| anywhere. There's a small amount of value to replicating
| research done in one population on a different population, but
| humans are broadly similar enough that it's not strictly
| necessary.
|
| On the other hand, there are fields where the location of the
| research absolutely does matter. This is true of the social
| sciences. Conclusions drawn about the functioning of one human
| culture are not broadly translatable to other cultures.
|
| This means that even if the net return on investment for
| medicine is higher (and it probably is, precisely because it
| translates to more people), it's actually more valuable for
| small countries to pay for their own social sciences than their
| own medical research. They can always take advantage of what
| others are learning about biology, but if they don't research
| the way that New Zealand works then no one will.
| neves wrote:
| "hard" science without social disciplines gave us Nazism
| wtcactus wrote:
| I see this as a good measure.
|
| I don't call for total abolishing of social "sciences" funding,
| but we need to stop putting real sciences and social sciences
| together in the same budget bucket.
|
| 1st, because the citizens are misled about the money that is
| actually making into real science.
|
| 2nd, because we hereby pass a message that when they hear the -
| now - infamous words "scientists claim", they will start being
| educated on if we are actually talking about proper scientists
| from physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, etc, or some
| ideologue from sociology that was being paid by public funds to
| spread some political ideology by abusing the term "science".
| LightBug1 wrote:
| First they came for the social scientists ...
|
| I reckon it'll be the artists next ...
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I mean it kind of was the artists first. It's nearly impossible
| to make a living as a writer, musician or visual artist and has
| been for a decade at least. The ones who did manage to produce
| anything just had their collective works strip mined to fuel
| the AI products that are displacing petty freelance work, their
| last reliable source of any income however insufficient.
| banach wrote:
| We live in dark ages.
| oulipo wrote:
| Shameful
| fpina wrote:
| Brutal!
| Neonlicht wrote:
| It's difficult for Americans to understand but most countries
| HAVE to live within their means.
|
| The $ allows the US to have a trillion dollar deficit but most
| have to start cutting.
| derbOac wrote:
| I think the concern is more about sweeping black-and-white
| decisions about funding than funding decisions per se?
|
| Also, discussions about "living within your means" almost
| always lead to questions about "who?" and "what is _really_
| leaving within your means? "
| intalentive wrote:
| Exorbitant privilege won't last forever.
| daedrdev wrote:
| It's not just their deficit. The American economy is more
| diverse, productive and dynamic. For example, median income
| adjusted for cost of living was 32K in NZ and 48k in the US
| TimedToasts wrote:
| Not all of us are in favor of trillion dollar deficits but we
| have almost no political power. :(
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I met some Kiwis through ecosystem restoration work.. I was
| amazed at the close bonds and good cheer in the large group of
| mainly European-descent people I met.. on the other hand, they
| quickly talked about naming themselves, their children and places
| in the Maori language.. They were quick to repeat things like "we
| are living on stolen land, this is the traditional lands of
| ancient elders etc"
|
| It seemed to be on a collision coarse in some deep way..
| fazeirony wrote:
| to me this is yet another canary in the mine moment. this same
| type of policy is happening all over and i feel humanity is
| headed for a _very_ dark next few decades at the very least...
| lambdaphagy wrote:
| It's difficult to characterize the social sciences as a whole.
| There's some great work, some mediocre but honest work, some
| deliberate fraud, and an awful lot of venial epistemic sins.
|
| But for the most part, the social sciences have become identified
| with a certain political worldview, to the point where the
| suppositions of this worldview can be assumed in papers without
| needing to be consciously articulated or defended. Indeed a lot
| of this work is explicitly concerned with finding ways to
| engineer public opinion in order to make this worldview more
| palatable to gen pop.
|
| Putting aside the question of whether that's good or bad, it's
| always puzzled me that the experts on social behavior are
| surprised when the people on the other side of that social
| engineering project get mad about it. Of all the imponderables of
| human nature, that seems like one of the easiest things to
| understand.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Kind of curious that this is happening in NZ, the tourism
| beneficiary of literary and artistic (and yes, technical)
| largesse...
|
| "The annual tourist influx to New Zealand grew 40%, from 1.7
| million in 2000 to 2.4 million in 2006, has been attributed in
| large part to The Lord of the Rings phenomenon. 6% of
| international visitors cited the film as a reason for traveling
| to the country."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_tourism#:~:text=in%20N....
| DrStartup wrote:
| Social science isn't really social science. It's all mentalism
| intalentive wrote:
| Social science research should probably be tied to a specific
| research program or campaign and integrated with policy and
| enforcement. Otherwise a researcher just writes a paper and
| that's it. Better to be more like DARPA or Bell Labs.
| fedeb95 wrote:
| funny thing, economy is a social science.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > The Marsden Fund was set up explicitly to support pure, "blue-
| sky" research, and its current modest budget could only support
| about 10% of the applications submitted. New Zealand's science
| sector already has several other and much larger funding sources
| for applied research, including the NZ$359 million Strategic
| Science Investment Fund and NZ$247 million Endeavour Fund. But
| the Marsden Fund supports nearly all the country's research in
| social science.
|
| Tough situation. Their response doesn't sound crazy to me. You
| have to cut something if you don't have enough money, and if I
| had to choose what to prioritize, I guess it would be core
| science research too.
|
| But, how did they let the budget shortfall get so large? Did this
| catch them by surprise or something? I'd expect this to have been
| a slow ramping down of new grants and renewals over years rather
| than a one time catastrophe.
|
| My post-graduate degree and currently only publication is in a
| social science area. I'm sympathetic to that kind of research in
| some ways, but pretty cynical about it in other ways. Shrinking
| the pool of social science researchers down to a much smaller and
| more competitive group does not even sound like a bad idea in
| feast times, let alone in famine.
| frio wrote:
| This government arrived on a promise of "fixing" our financial
| problems. A lot of these shortfalls have been artificially
| created; as an example, our healthcare sector went from
| breaking even to being "hundreds of millions" in deficit after
| the budget was massaged. That created the "crisis" that let
| them fire the board in charge and appoint a commissioner who
| has been aggressively slashing public services in order to meet
| the new budget. The reduction in service is driving growth in
| the private insurance sector.
|
| Science is in a similar position. The shortfalls they're
| talking about now are shortfalls they created last year and
| left to rot so they could have a crisis now.
|
| It's cynical and depressing.
| raydiak wrote:
| Chilling foreshadowing playbook for the next four years of
| DOGE, DOE, DOJ, DOD, et al in the US
| robocat wrote:
| > A lot of these shortfalls have been artificially created
|
| Can you point to a link showing this?
|
| Officially: Our revised budget for 2024/25 is
| a $1.1 billion deficit. This is significantly lower than the
| $1.76 billion deficit we were heading towards without our
| cost reduction programme," Ms Apa says
|
| https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/corporate-information/news-
| an...
| frio wrote:
| I'm on my phone right now and getting search engines to
| limit their time frame in a mobile UI is tiresome, so I'll
| do that when I'm back at a computer :) (but the core thing
| to do is compare projected budget under the previous govt
| and actual budget under this govt). Both of those numbers
| above are post-new budget. The budgeted "increase" in
| healthcare was less than the increases in population and
| inflation. It gets worse when we add in the fact that NZ
| has an aging population with requisite cost increases. This
| govt gave us tax cuts and restored billions of dollars in
| tax rebate for landlords which decreased the spending pool
| available for things like healthcare.
| abeppu wrote:
| > government said it would divert half of the NZ$75 million
| Marsden Fund, the nation's sole funding source for fundamental
| science, to "research with economic benefits." Moreover, the fund
| would no longer support any social sciences and humanities
| research
|
| It does seem misguided to assume that no research in the social
| sciences or humanities can drive economic benefits. Aside from
| economics which can obviously drive insights and recommendations
| of economic value, psychology includes e.g. industrial-
| organizational psychology (which can help teams and organizations
| be effective today), developmental psychology/educational
| psychology (which should inform education policy), etc. While I
| can understand a desire to ensure funding is targeted at readily
| applicable areas, this seems like it cuts off potentially
| valuable opportunities.
| acc_297 wrote:
| Move over and make some space, Voltaire's Bastards are coming
| through.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| If the world was free of second order effects, Judith Collin's
| would be a great politician. Unfortunately throughout my life and
| having listened to her speak in person more than once, she's came
| across as someone not intelligent enough to manage the
| responsibilities she gets herself into.
| strawhatguy wrote:
| Sounds like a good thing, as social sciences aren't often, let's
| say, rigorous, and the conclusions are often dubious (since they
| aren't falsifiable.
|
| That said, isn't the headline misleading? It's not _all_ support,
| it 's all support - from this particular Marsden Fund.
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