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SOPA Creator Now In Charge of NSF Grants
sl4shd0rk writes "Remember SOPA? If not, perhaps the name Lamar Smith will ring a bell. The U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology chose Smith to Chair as an overseer for the National Science Foundation's funding process. Smith is preparing a bill (PDF) which will require that every grant must benefit 'national defense,' be of 'utmost importance to society,' and not be 'duplicative of other research.' Duplicating research seems reasonable until you consider that this could also mean the NSF will not provide funding for research once someone has already provided results — manufactured or otherwise. A strange target since there is a process in place which makes an effort to limit duplicate funding already. The first and second requirements, even when read in context, still miss the point of basic research. If we were absolutely without-a-doubt-certain of the results, there would be little point in doing the research in the first place."
This job got easier when I realized nobody was going to try and duplicate my results.
The purpose of research is to create evidence when we make a case for something we want. We *will* duplicate research programs so that we have an increased chance of getting the results we are paying for. But once those reqults are acquired, no further research is needed.
Smoking is good for you.
A certain set of Republican politicians are very opposed to the National Science Foundation, as far as I can tell for two reasons:
1. For some politicians (and grassroots conservatives), they oppose some of the actual research being done. For example, they do not want to fund global-warming research, do not want to fund studies of gun violence, and do not particularly want there to be social-science research into issues such as racism or economic inequality.
2. For other politicians, it's just a convenient source of material for people who want to pose as cutting government spending without having to propose serious cuts any of the programs that take up more significant parts of the budget, because those are either too popular and/or politically too well-connected. Instead they just try to make political hay out of finding a few programs in the single-digit millions which they can attack as "frivolous". So, for example, Tom Coburn compiles an annual list of NSF-funded research projects he considers frivolous. You know, frivolous stuff like robotics research.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Science is nothing without replication. If you are building an experimental approach based on some result, you have to replicate it before building on this result any further, otherwise your method might be flawed.
To make this clear - let's say some lab produced a result that chemical A is a carcinogen. And I want to test whether this depends on other factors, e.g. genetic background, immune system response, whatever. I will first replicate the result before going on, otherwise I don't have a method. It's that simple.
People in these positions have to be scientist, or at least have had a scientific training, this is a good example of why.
Alas, the 'national defense' bit is by far the less problematic portion:
"(1) is in the interests of the United States to
advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare,
and to secure the national defense by promoting the
progress of science;"
Ok, so (1) doesn't include noble goals like "Science, because knowing shit is awesome!"; but it's vacuous enough that nearly anything fits. If it is 'science' it probably helps you(or may help you in the future) manipulate the world in some way, and any positive manipulations count as 'national health, prosperity, or welfare' and any negative ones can be dropped on people we dislike and called 'national defense'.
"(2) is the finest quality, is ground breaking,
and answers questions or solves problems that are of
utmost importance to society at large;"
Here's where it goes downhill: Basic Research, motherfucker, have you heard of it? Contrary to what the movies might have led you to believe, 'science' isn't something that a single multidisciplinarian genius brings from test tube to field-ready superpower within a 10 minute montage set in a 'laboratory' that looks more like a small datacenter set up to impress visitors. And, when a given piece of research is the lucky one to go down in history as "Dr. Somebody Invented X", the writeup will have about a zillion papers of the form "A banal and seemingly pointless characterization of bandgap somethingorother in ionized flebatonium" that seemed like pointless noodling until they turned out to be useful.
C'mon, Lamar, I realize that not much gets past your shit-eating grin and incredible density; but surely you don't imagine that scientists who could be out raking in the nobels and lucrative startup stock by cranking out world-altering research of staggering utility are just holding out on us, and sequencing random beetle genomes because grantwriting is just so much fun? If there were plenty of 'groundbreaking' research that 'answers questions or solves problems of utmost importance to society at large' scientists would be shiving one another with broken Erlenmeyer flasks to be the first to do it. Guess what, most of science is just prep work for the good stuff, much of which we don't even know will be the good stuff until we've already done the prep work.
Clause 1 is just babble, of no real consequence(except perhaps to make paper abstracts and grant proposals even more vaguely optimistic); but clause 2 essentially provides unlimited scope to defund absolutely anything that isn't the final stages of a successful R&D exercise.
For those that have even a fragment of history, you'll remember that the middle east used to be a center of learning and science.
In the days of the crusades, their scientific knowledge far outstripped that of Europe (there's a reason the numerals we use today are called "arabic numerals".
So, what happened to change that? Did Europe suddenly invest massively in science to go toe to toe? Alas not. Religious zealots got in places of power, and started to dictate that the progress of science was "against the will of god" (as the priesthood didn't understand it, so it scared them, and anything that scares a religious zealot is "against the will of god"). The role of religion in Europe started to lessen, allowing scientific method to progress apace and advancement to occur.
There's a reason ethics committees exist for scientific projects; the lay-people on them are a voice for the average person: They force the people doing pure science to think carefully about ramifications of performing experimentation in a particular fashion (is the experiment ethical? Can the way it's performed in a different way, not affecting the core of the theory, that is ethical?). The professionals are there to ensure the science is actually valid and to pick out the ones sloppily created that are mathematically wrong, or are unable by structure to draw the conclusions they're looking for from the experiments performed.
I'm vaguely hopeful that this incursion of zealotry into the workings of scientific progress can be rooted out and cast aside, but from the path that the US has been following towards a combination between a corporate feudalism headed by a close to a theocracy (what are the chances of an atheist being elected president these days, since the pledge of allegiance was altered in 1954 to include the "under god" segment; no, for you younger ones, that wasn't part of the original, and was tagged on for political ends), it's not a certainty. That's somewhat worrying really.
Because we as a nation keep asking for them because:
* They help our business interests.
* They appeal to our religious convictions.
* They look good and sound good on the local TV.
* We think no wrong of them because it's always the other idiots outside our districts that are the problem all over the country.
* We actually think these people care for us and buy in to the bull in the campaign ads.
Uninformed and uneducated voters are killing the country. They scream about kicking carrier politicians out but never really start with their own house while expecting somoene else to do it elsewhere.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
"We" didn't. My state voted 54% to 45% for democratic representatives, due to gerrymandering in 2010, that resulted in 9 republican reps and 4 democratic ones.
They have power because they have power, and use that power to maintain power.