[davidbau]

My gosh, I think COVID distancing has been bad for all our mental health.

Or maybe this kind of trash is the output of professional RIA trolls. This article is an anti-science, anti-government fever dream masquerading as a critique of federal funding of science, and I’m not sure why it gets upvotes. It has nothing to do with federal funding and everything to do with the author’s inability to imagine that his fellow citizens might be trying to act in good faith. Substitute any public good for the word “science”, and the article is the same. Should society really be burned down, because, uh, military-industrial complex?

Someday after people like the author have decimated all of modern civilization, historians will look back at the era of Big Science in the 20+21st century U.S. as one of humanity’s great achievements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_policy

Living in America we take for granted the internet, materials science, agriculture, meteorology, geography, as well as all the eye-catching astronomical telescopes etc. As a country we have been big believers in the value of uncovering the truth. And it has worked. Consider that the entire field of modern biology is a product of big government science. It was a freshly-minted postdoc who got a government job at the NIH who actually cracked the genetic code, (yes it was a lowly government employee who did it, years after fancy famous academics theorized about it without actually doing the gruntwork of setting up the decisive experiments to decode the actual code). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Warren_Nirenberg . Maybe the problem is that government science is not promoted by big marketing machines. The nature of public science is that the work is left to speak for itself. So scientists like Nirenberg are not as celebrated as some startup founders or even university professors. But a huge amount of modern science and modern society rests on these everyday government-funded science efforts.

It is disgusting that the public servants who have long been doing good, hard, thankless work, are now being vilified.

Please don’t burn it all down.

[goatsneez]

I think the point of the writing in this article (and many similar ones out-there, including dozens upon dozens of published ones from academics themselves) is to point out a systemic problem that has emerged from the complexity of our civilization which is increasingly dependent on the institution of science to provide facts (and also "facts" used for political/policy advertisement) on plethora of diverse issues. The values you try to defend in your post are real but are not under question or even in the spotlight.

The bureaucratization of science, the science institutions metrics and evaluation, the iron-triangle (written about 2-3 decades by academics) all are valid issues which now seep out to the public. If you want more "posh" articles see https://innovationfrontier.org/fix-science-dont-just-fund-it... or here (science is self-destructing...) https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/saving-science

In short, there is no need to "burn it all down", but denying or ignoring what appears nowadays even to an outsider(s) (for the article is clearly by a non-academic and it is not exactly just an outlier) obvious means that discussion and thinking about improvements is in place. Having a debate, well, on HN is not really impact-full... but regardless.