Billions 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.
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
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…