Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal CollapseBillions of dollars have been wiped from research budgets, almost 8,000 grants have been cancelled at NIH and the US National Science Foundation alone, and more than 1,000 NIH employees have been fired.
Normal people in the US MASSIVELY underestimate the damage that has been done to the US by destroying science as a career here, it is sickening and to be honest makes it really hard to even want to try to be a part of this shit society in any meaningful way.
The US is racing towards collapse and scientific institutions included but the real collapse story here is the fact that everybody seems resigned to just letting science go away as if it was a fun hobby and not an existentially necessary pillar holding society up and bulwarking our "economic productivity" with new tools, new perspectives and new safeguards to prevent natural catastrophe from robbing us of success.
That is what I will remember most about this time, that the average person in my society sees supporting science with actual money as something akin to getting distracted about sending cool robots to Mars because it is exciting (which is cool and I think we should do it, but a different argument fundamentally then say funding basic vaccine research).
No, many many many of us will die because we have destroyed the funding of science in the US, many are already dying and yet in the midst of this wave of violence try talking to the average USian and they will act like it is a detail that science has been destroyed here, not one of the primary emergencies.
"We have to focus on the economy" US centrists say brushing the blowing out of the keystone piece of the US economy and basic cohesion of systems within it completely out of frame to focus on abstract fabricated ideas like GDP or stocks or some other nearly meaningless factor with respect to our daily lives.
Collapse is many things, but it is always a product of a refusal to listen in favor of orbiting a comforting theology without examining it closely enough to be disappointed.
Companies have dramatically cut back their once-healthy R&D budgets in favor of buying out startups (often supported by SBIR and NSF grants) incubated from universities (with public funds). This directs public money into private profits and society at large is letting that happen. I think it's because everyday folks don't think of science as the process of understanding; the image of progress has been co-opted by tech-bros and big pharma.
I talked to my wife about emigrating after the 2024 elections happened. She wants to stay for family ties and I think I'm too old anyways. As much as science investment (and respect) are being kneecapped in the US right now, I want to stay and advocate for/at my country even if it doesn't value my vocation
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We are already at a point in the collapse where progress in the sciences comes as a trade off. In order to pour millions into R+D, that's money that can't be spent on schools and bridges. Science is not free, the society pays the overhead.
The question is whether the society gets a return on the investment or not. Obviously science produces results, but are the results worth the cost?
Joseph Tainter wrote about this in his paper "Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies".
There is a pretty good discussion of this issue around pages 16 onward.
Basically we have this near-religious faith that progress comes from research and new technology, but basically that stopped being true over a generation ago. He shows that the returns to society diminished after all the easy knowledge was figured out.
Scientists don't drive to the lab looking at homeless people and think "I caused that". But that's how the system has been working. We are not creating prosperity.
So what about the trillion a year that we throw into the pentagon, is that building you bridges and schools?
With all due respect, do you know that more money is spent on Science than the entire defense budget?
Like I take your point, but also it's more complicated. I'd argue that zero science can be done without policing the worlds shipping lanes and supply chains. There is possibly a lot of waste corruption and destruction in the defense budget BUT...
Further down the comments in this very discussion someone starts talking about how Einstein and the theory of relativity began the development that causes the GPS grid.
I could advance an argument that ALL the current high technology is a product of public defense spending and not science funding. Like virtually all the technology inside the modern cell phone originated as defense spending that was then given over free of charge to large corporations to make consumer products and privatize the profits. (Touch screens computers, radio, satellites, GPS, the internet etc are from military).
Like, it's not as pure an example as I think you're hoping to make. There absolutely is a clear high return on investment on part of defense spending. A lot of pure science doesn't create this kind of result.
I think it's proof that we are civilizationally pretty broken that this could happen, but also it's nice to look at it realistically and consider what this means about us.
Care to cite the more than $1T science budget figure or is it safe to assume you made it up
No, I didn't make it up.
Most people haven't ever thought about this or checked their assumptions and biases. And I say that because you're assuming I made it up but YOU don't actually have the figures. Very interesting.
You want the citation or can you look it up all on your own?
I'll give you a hint. Its very hard to find any citation that will compare defense to science in a direct way.
What you can easily do is find a number for the science spending as a percentage of GDP, and a number that gives you the defense budget with identical terms.
Once you check you are welcome to report back if you disagree.
So this will really require two citations and some critical thinking
[ * elsewhere I commented that we spend more on science in the USA than rhe transportation sector. Feel free to check that also, but again, you can't read this anywhere except by asking the questions yourself.]
All that to say, source = I made it the fuck up
Lazy. Weak argument.
You are falsely framing science as an elective introduction of new context rather than the professional process of understanding the context we have already been forced into.
We do science to be MORE efficient through a process of understanding the contexts we cannot escape.
As the highest-return solutions are exhausted, only more costly approaches remain to be adopted. As the highest-return ways to produce resources, conduct transactions, process information, and organize society are pro- gressively implemented, adaptive problems must be addressed by more costly and less effective responses. As the costs of solutions grow, the point is reached where further investments in complexity do not give a propor- tionate return.
where further investments in complexity do not give a proportionate return.
Science is not the pursuit of complexity, nor of power, it is the pursuit of understanding. The fact that you don't seem to grasp that is alarming and must be indicative of a lack in interest in you of Science beyond its intersections with Technology even as you condemn Technology...
I am insulted as someone who believes deeply in Science as first and foremost a commitment to understanding the world around us. This isn't about making transistors smaller or jet engines higher thrust so Number Go Up and you insult countless Scientists by making the generalization that it is.
What's your definition of complexity?
I'm using it in the collapse science definition.
Why is it relevant? You are falling prey to a similar logical fallacy that people do with evolution by assuming that the path of evolution is always towards more complexity.
Most people probably do believe that evolution always leads to more complexity, the classic image of an ape evolving to a human walking upright is rooted in the center of most people's subconscious understanding of how complexity arises and evolves within systems that variously reward it.
In reality however that is a serious thinking error, evolution can be a forcing towards more or less complexity, it depends on the environment. Similarly, Science does not necessarily produce more complexity nor does it value it as a product, to the contrary a major concern of Science is often taking a whole set of half explanations that fit together in confounding, complex and contradicting ways and resolving them into a comparatively elegant theory that gets to the heart of the nature of the thing trying to be understood.
You seem to be locked into a belief that Science leads to more and more complexity necessarily and that assumption fails at a philosophical level before we even get into specifics.
Pseudo-Science which abounds and is always trying to drown us in self-inflicted suffering is a form of complexity, false beliefs grounded in nothing that require very specific rules to be followed with no real explanation are complexity (hence why we came up with the term "Cargo Cult"), overly oppressive theological ideologies are complex and brutalize people through their arbitrary complexity. Science is often the only way to defang these forms of complexity and the answers Science gives are often far less "complicated" than the bullshit people come up with to explain things they can't explain.
Ok, wait a second.
WHAT is complexity in this context? Define please.
Complexity =/= complicated. You are going off on a reaction without even understanding my argument or the conceptual framework I'm coming in from.
If wasn't 100% correct in the analysis that scientific production requires complexity, then you have no complaint about modern government funding major institutions to go acquire more knowledge, your issue is moot. Just go do science. Einstein worked in a patent office. What's the issue?
You define it, it makes my head hurt thinking about it.
To put it another way, complexity is the encapsulating border we cannot decipher.
Diminishing returns are largely unavoidable, and not a sufficient argument against anything, really. The Wheel was pretty impactful and had higher ROI than satellites, and I'm still glad we didn't stop there. Science and R&D are getting more expensive and that's fine - especially if you don't worship quarterly profit margins.
Also, I'm afraid you're wrong that scientists aren't aware of the costs of their work and that those resources could go to more urgent needs. A virology buddy told me about a meeting he had with bill gates at a grant symposium and how it came up "I could buy millions of mosquito nets and save X lives with this grant money, why is it better spent on you?" Society should value both longer term understanding and capability as well as taking care of people today; let's not pretend that those are only balanced against each other.
Diminishing returns are largely unavoidable, and not a sufficient argument against anything, really.
Did the invention of the wheel have diminishing returns? Be very careful now.
Like, you're assuming a priori that this is an unavoidable situation? That's wrong in my view. The "Diminishing Returns are Unavoidable" line is what modern institutions accept as generationally normal, but this is a very special condition that definitely did not exist before ~1970. (Think about science like Newton Mendel and Einstein and how much they achieved with how little.)
Diminishing returns TELL US something very important. Science has studied science-itself. The question is whether people are really open minded to accepting what we are seeing.
This is a form of "implicatory denial". Nobody is outright denying that a lot of this isn't money, time, lives and careers wasted in pursuit of not many results. However, we are not truly willing to accept it. Because we have nothing else to hope for. The implications of there being no more "low hanging fruit" of knowledge expansion and what that might mean for the civilization and its future are very threatening to our sense of moral and cultural narratives. It's existentially awakening to ask this question.
Nobody is willing to say (yet) that the Jenga tower should not go higher, but that's what the message really is. All the research is saying that we are not investing in the right things [*].
( * like, my background is in science and I read a lot of science now. You only need high school physics and you can debunk a lot of space exploration as a dead end from a results perspective (it's not a solution that exists) which doesn't stop NASA from generating indirect returns to the society. But a lot of current day research and development is purely "instrumental" (closed loop cause-effect) and not systemic in importance. At what point do we ask ourselves WHY we're doing anything?)
The wheel was "low-hanging fruit", The next branch with fruit is higher and requires more effort to get to. It sounds like you are positing that at a certain point, we should be happy with the fruit that we have and not build the next rung in the ladder since that ring is much more expensive than the last.
The argument supporting this is that if you want a sustainable civilization, your yearly energy budget is fundamentally equal to the energy coming into the system (read solar insolation of the Earth) per year, everything else is reducing internal gradients or depleting finite resources. As science gets more expensive per tier, supporting it could squeeze out necessary expenditures on the populace.
The counterargument is that science is still valuable a) because it can improve efficiency (output per input) allowing better QoL within a sustainable energy budget, and b) because what are we humans here for if not to explore and live full lives?
While justifying it by identifying that science can just slow down to be sustainable. We don't have to give up on the next highest fruit branch, we can just get there more slowly. On a basic level, it's ok if the rate of progress slows down in the name of sustainability.
That's all macro though. Short term, society has cancerous assholes hoarding wealth and resources, stealing from the public purse. US has always had an anti-intellectual streak but some people in charge believed in progress and saw it as a worthwhile investment. Current admin, and a lot of the populace on the other hand, are happy to see the brain drain to other countries that value science, R&D. Not all of us though mRNA flu vaccine backtrack shows that. Next few years will be interesting
When people first start looking for gold, they find giant nuggets just sitting there.
Then they use pans, horses and pickaxes to find chunks of gold in rivera and seams in the rock.
Then they build huge floating factories to dredge up entire landscapes and sift for tiny flecks of gold sand.
THEN they gather a massive amount of human slaves to gather host rock and process it with cyanide to leach the gold out of massive amounts of overburden.
At some point whatever new gold is left to go get takes the wealth you already have and lowers it. You will spend more gold mining than you will pull out of the ground. Nobody is saying you can't go mine new gold today. It's that it has a negative return on investment. This is beyond the inflection point. Many many things could go into the calculus for what it costs... Your technology, your price of energy, the degree of automation, etc. You might be able to play with your accounting for a long time and find corners of the planet that are favorable...
But to go mine for something that isn't there and isn't producing a return make you poor now. In reality / realistic terms this is now different.
So then you end up asking yourself: "what is this gold even for?" And that's like looking into the abyss because our culture doesn't have a collective meaning to organize society if this goes away.
Ok, so that's an analogy. Science used to work, and everything is screaming that we are close to the end now.
Like every government, every company, all our organizations, they all depend on this facade continuing... And so the end of science is extremely damaging to the story we tell ourselves.
If that story were to go away we would have to ask some big questions
It sounds like you are positing that at a certain point, we should be happy with the fruit that we have and not build the next rung in the ladder since that ring is much more expensive than the last.
You almost understand my point.
It's not JUST that it becomes MORE expensive (than before).
It becomes MORE expensive than THE RETURN. Ie, its actually dependent on the host body which it depletes like a parasitic relationship.
Therefore this acts as a collapse acceleration device.
This is not MY idea, I'm telling you what's in the scientific literature of the study of collapse.
Like in the middle ages, they would have a whole class of clergy and they can build a beautiful basilica while people are diseased and starving. But it didn't help their civilization survive. Most of these civilizations collapse due to internal damage to their culture of surviving BEFORE they trigger bio-physical scarcity. Its quite sobering. [ * read Peter Turchin and his theory of elite overproduction causing political economic collapse before physical collapse. The more unproductive members of the society are dependent on the society, the faster and more unstable the collapse becomes.)
Like the last Norse in Greenland didn't outlive the seals. You get it?
This is why the collapse science people focus on complexity versus simplification
Thought experiment for you: Imagine that we cannot go out and look for any new solutions any more. We would therefore have to solve all our problems with what we already know how to do.
Would there be any point in kicking the can on solving our issues? Or would we need to get started right now? If we couldn't invest in speculative solutions that will solve our problems tomorrow I think that a great deal of what's going on today would immediately be suspect.
Like, we hold hope that we can find something NEW that will change how hard survival will be and what it will really cost us.
Precautionary principal today simply gets thrown out if we think we can fix our mistakes in the future.
This is how we created our systemic overshoot in the first place. This is why it pushes peoples buttons to even suggest that this is wrong... The illusion serves a purpose. A lot of people don't really realize that science failed 50 years ago and that it has been propped up as a secular religion/ideology.
If a person came out of a 50 year coma in 1900 they would not recognize their world at all. In 1950 they would have no clue what's going on. A person waking up from a 50 year coma in 2026 doesn't see a new world that they don't have a basis to understand....
We do science to be more efficient, not less.
That's how collapse accelerates. (Jevons paradox.) Your scholarship of collapse is lacking. Every civilization collapse is at a technological peak.
Technology is problem solving.
Technology is problem creating.
You should back up and read what the academic have already worked out.
Tainter points out in the linked paper that research has TWO functions. One is to create new context (resource discovery). Another is for creating new information (information and communication is around 90% of all science funding now)..
Like, first of all understand what you're even talking about.
Why are you acting like Science and Technology are the same concept? It completely muddles your arguments.
So science is to be applied towards efficiency?
Or science is purely information?
Which goalpost are you using? (You keep switching every comment.)
I'm saying that it's both definitiona, the more all encompassing idea. This is how Tainter approaches it also.
Simple question for you: is science sustainable?
Take for example the purely monetary question...the USA is currently spending more on science research than it already spends on transportation. At what level of scarcity and collapse and resource constraint would be a point where that seems likely to be a tradeoff not worth making?
