This saddens me greatly.

I think to certain people, this is viewed as a necessary trade-off to curb the political power and influence of the so-called "Professional Managerial Class" in the United States, due to fears that a version of James Burnham's prediction[1] would come true. When this discourse comes up on sites like Twitter, and people ask why we're doing it, supporters of these cuts ultimately lay the blame at the feet of two camps: Campus protesters and the response to COVID (Masking, vaccine mandates, etc). I think for some people, those things were so traumatic the entire system needed to be torn down. I think the former is mostly harmless and the latter was necessary, but the faction in power doesn't see things that way - and the dissolution of scientific power in the US is how they're going to feel secure again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Managerial_Revolution

Bienvenue en France !

We need another Bell Labs where people can experiment without immediate monetization. Look at the history of lasers and such. Took decades but now we have femto pulse lasers for Lasik and such.

> Researchers mustn’t be complacent. They must communicate the difference between eliminating ideologically objectionable programmes and undermining the entire research ecosystem.

This is a weird statement. Researchers -- everyone, really -- must communicate that eliminating whole areas of research because the current administration deems them "ideologically objectionable" is suicidal. What is this, a dictatorship?

> No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...

It's by design.

Aand of course this submission gets flagged.

Professionalization and high employee debt means that the employees will choose sel-prezervation over creative inquiry and truth seeking.

Carring on with this too blantly and over time, it seems self-undermining.

I'd guess Science died the day it was born as "Science". So being a Science superpower really means being a gatekeeping Science-containment Superpower. Antiscience?

The Manhattan Project is the most important example of the power that can be achieved through collaborative work between the private sector and the government. It allowed us to win the war and surpass Hitler's scientists. All thanks to Roosevelt's understanding of the letter from Einstein, Szilard, Teller & Wigner.

As the US is being torn down for fun and profit it seems like I've seen Vannevar Bush's name pop up more and more frequently.

It seems that this dude had a huge influence on the shape of our society.

A dumb populace is way easier to direct into self-destruction for profit, so why would we value knowledge?

Why on earth would this submission be flagged? Mods, if you're watching, please unflag this post.

Please unflag this post. Steve Blank is an extreme moderate in the sense that he is non-political. So is this post. It is laying out an uncomfortable truth that impacts hackers in the US and everywhere. The simple facts is, our startup culture is under attack by the current administration. Should this attack be successful, we will no longer have startups, because without scientific research from US universities, supported by public grants, we will no longer have round A/B/C. It's game over for YCombinator and hacker culture in the US. We will all need to move to China. Sound extreme? It's not.

Jobless climate and gender scientists just refuse to stop stirring up and start learning a trade...