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In the Trump Administration, Science Is Unwelcome. So Is Advice. (nytimes.com)
Anonymous readers share a report: As President Trump prepares to meet Kim Jong-un of North Korea to negotiate denuclearization, a challenge that has bedeviled the world for years, he is doing so without the help of a White House science adviser or senior counselor trained in nuclear physics. Mr. Trump is the first president since 1941 not to name a science adviser, a position created during World War II to guide the Oval Office on technical matters ranging from nuclear warfare to global pandemics. As a businessman and president, Mr. Trump has proudly been guided by his instincts. Nevertheless, people who have participated in past nuclear negotiations say the absence of such high-level expertise could put him at a tactical disadvantage in one of the weightiest diplomatic matters of his presidency.
"You need to have an empowered senior science adviser at the table," said R. Nicholas Burns, who led negotiations with India over a civilian nuclear deal during the George W. Bush administration. "You can be sure the other side will have that." The lack of traditional scientific advisory leadership in the White House is one example of a significant change in the Trump administration: the marginalization of science in shaping United States policy. There is no chief scientist at the State Department, where science is central to foreign policy matters such as cybersecurity and global warming. Nor is there a chief scientist at the Department of Agriculture: Mr. Trump last year nominated Sam Clovis, a former talk-show host with no scientific background, to the position, but he withdrew his name and no new nomination has been made.
"You need to have an empowered senior science adviser at the table," said R. Nicholas Burns, who led negotiations with India over a civilian nuclear deal during the George W. Bush administration. "You can be sure the other side will have that." The lack of traditional scientific advisory leadership in the White House is one example of a significant change in the Trump administration: the marginalization of science in shaping United States policy. There is no chief scientist at the State Department, where science is central to foreign policy matters such as cybersecurity and global warming. Nor is there a chief scientist at the Department of Agriculture: Mr. Trump last year nominated Sam Clovis, a former talk-show host with no scientific background, to the position, but he withdrew his name and no new nomination has been made.
The people giving advice on Korea have been fucking it up for 60-ish years, and REALLY fucking it up for 25 resulting in a viable nuclear program. So I wouldn't listen to them either.
The only thing Trump believes in is money, and money has "In god we trust", so who the hell needs science. And the problem with science advisors, they know WAY too much that Trump does not understand. And as for all the GREAT PEOPLE that Trump knows....he'll probably end up pardoning most of them, including himself.
White House science adviser or senior counselor trained in nuclear physics.
Why would you need EITHER of those people to meet with someone like Kim Jong-un?
They are not going to meet about science. They are not going to talk about how nuclear weapons are constructed.
They are going to meet for the purpose of North Korea *giving up* nuclear weapons and rejoining with the south.
What kind of "experts" can really help you here? Kim Jong-un is not exactly well balanced. What you need is someone who can steer a power-mad and basically unbalanced person into doing something you want them to do, to point out how it's really in their best interests also.
Trump is probably the ONLY president who can pull this off. Because unlike any of the past presidents for many decades, he will speak plainly, and as a result he actually will be more trusted and respected by someone who doesn't really know who to trust.
Trump also has the experience in handling unbalanced megalomaniacs in spades, thanks to his working with real-estate construction all around the world, but most especially New York City. I defy anyone to claim that Kim Jong-un is harder to work with than the upper echelons of the Teamsters.
One last point - the very LAST person you want to bring to a nuclear disarmament party is a nuclear weapons expert, that just screams you are not truly serious about them getting rid of nuclear weapons and they would act accordingly.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...if this meeting was something other than a photo-op. I don't think anything of substance will be discussed, and the only question is when exactly will the name-calling start again.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
One way or another, I have a sneaking suspicion he'll be the last, "businessman" to be "elected" to be "president" of the "United" States.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
science was also unwelcome when it came to facts like sexual dimorphism, the 'wage gap', and 'patriarchy theory.'
Ideologues hate inconvenient truth.
Trump is anti-science. Science ia the driving force of technology. This article is in the right place. Trump can and does do wrong. Thats reality. Deny it if you want.
Many people like to blame Trump, but he is a symptom of the US Environment. When Education is constantly cut for a period of 40 years and constant hate towards educated people, this is how things end up.
On TV you see nothing but Reality Shows and shows talking about Ancient Aliens and other such things. You end you with a population that believes Science is fake and thinks Angels and other such things will come and 'save us'.
More people seem to believe in pseudoscience (wikipedia) than anything else, thus you get a Trump and I do not see that changing
Trump is a fucking moron. Causing problems with our allies that fought and died for us in wars we convinced them to join will sucking up to Putin. You are a moron.
First comes the actual agreement, then come the steps two get rid of the nuclear weapons in many later steps... as I said, it sends a bad signal to assume and indicate anything about the deal, or to indicate what boundaries of a potential deal you are willing to accept ahead of time.
You are not thinking about this at all rationally, only peering through a tiny lens of science-religion onto a vastly complex landscape that is negotiation at a country level. You may as well be demanding Trump include a four leaf clover in his underwear.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is coming from the New York Times. Keep that in mind as you read this article.
;)
Just my 2 cents
Of course they do but South Korea credits Trump for talks with North Korea - wouldn't they be in a little better position to know who to credit than you?
I mean, for decades there has been the opposite of progress, with North Korea developing nuclear weapons unchecked, killing soldiers from South Korea and America without repercussion. The government of South Korea has been as it is for a very long time.
The only variable in this large equation that has changed is the introduction of Trump. So yes South Korea aided this by being open to talks, but it would not have happened (because it DID NOT HAPPEN) without Trump. End of story.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, but Trump is actually a strong sociopath unlike presidents for decades before him.
Um, Trump is a sociopath that makes 'strong' statements and routinely backs down from them. But he's so strong that he refuses to admit he's backed down. I guess as long as the press has some modicum of 'The Emporor's New Clothes' respect left for the office, he can get away with that. But how exactly does that make him strong?
And how the fuck have we gotten to the point where somebody like you, who seem nominally literate, will fawn over somebody being a sociopath - strong or otherwise? Or are paid trolls being dispatched to such obscure corners of the Internet as Slashdot? Now that's scary.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Well, at least they haven't started WWIII over the issue up until now.
They very much did by allowing to let North Korean (and Iran) get within one launch or a smuggled shipping port nuke away from starting WWIII (or at least a nuclear conflict).
You can start wars through inaction as well action, you know.
Just because the nuclear shot has not been fired does not mean the war has not begin.
I mean, we have dead U.S. soldiers (from Iran and North Korea) and everything... how is that not a war?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What I find odd is that there's so many pro Trump folks on /. (which is ostensibly a site for pro-science nerds)
Many folks here on /. are indeed pro-science nerds. Many are also libertarian and don't like government regulation. Of the viable candidates, Trump was the most likely to reduce government regulation. Personally I am not a big fan of the president, but his election wasn't a surprise to me, nor is the support for him here on /.
until Saddam & Gaddafi. In both cases we secured promises, backed up by extensive international inspections, that they would not develop weapons of mass destruction. And in both cases we proved to be untrustworthy and brutal and arranged for both men to be murdered (Gaddafi died with a bayonet twisting in his gut).
Kim would be a real mad man if he stopped trying to get nukes after seeing what we do to people who relinquish them
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Do you have any examples (specific quotations would be awesome but I think that might be asking too much) of bad science advice people have given with regards to Korea?
Well the scientists working with intelligence agencies have been wrong about the speed at which North Korean could develop nuclear weapons and delivery technology basically forever - from the most recent example:
" At the start of Donald Trump's presidency, American intelligence agencies told the new administration that while North Korea had built the bomb, there was still ample time - upward of four years - to slow or stop its development of a missile capable of hitting an American city with a nuclear warhead."
But this kind of terrible under-estimation goes back decades.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How is it stale if he is running point for the Russians just this week? He's acting in their geopolitical interests now, and is quite open about it. The lingering issues haven't been resolved yet (though Manafort is being buried under a mountain of indictments), and Trump piling on more and more new issues. I have a hard time seeing how the damage won't be extremely long lasting and reshape the post Cold-war political order, well past however long the Trump presidency lasts.
It's not the press man.
They are hoarse from pointing out his lack of clothing for the last 9-12 months.
The problem is Mr. Trump's authoritarian followers. Read up on the authoritarian mindset. It's present in about 25% of any population. It's capable of flipping on a dime repeatedly to conform to whatever the leader's new reality is.
It is probably a huge survival trait in authoritarian regimes.
If Mr. Trump says the sky is black, then to the authoritarian's, it's sincerely black.
If the next day he says it is yellow, then it's sincerely yellow to them.
They have little to no cognitive dissonance.
We did a lot of research into this after world war 2.
As long as democracy, honesty, and a free press are valued by the leadership- then the authoritarians value it. But they can flip on a dime to not valuing democracy, honesty, and a free press. Consider how many flipped from hating Russia to loving Russia in under 6 months. People who disliked Russia their entire lives suddenly were fine with Russia.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
(like a 270% tariff on dairy going into Canada, a very real and chilling fact about which I had no idea previously).
Then I suppose you also don't know that the US provides over $22 billion a year in direct subsidies to US dairy producers, accounting for over 40% of all dairy profits?
That's right -- American taxpayers are paying for >40% of all dairy production in the US.
Canada (at least in Ontario) also subsidizes dairy producers, by limiting the number of producers. The industry pretends in their literature that this matches supply to demand, which is trivially absurd because "demand" does not exist independent of supply. It's a curve, not a single value. (For the literature, see, e.g., https://www.milk.org/Corporate...)
So basically, they're keeping the number of dairy licenses low which makes the wealthiest farmers rich, the poor farmers unable to enter the market, and dairy more expensive for everyone. They keep the price artificially high by doing this and by having insane tariffs on importing dairy. It's not like they're just putting tariffs on commercial imports--they charge ridiculous tariffs if an individual drives across the border with it.
I'm not defending the President's actions--ultimately he's doing something anyone competent knows is stupid to appeal to voters who don't understand trade. The most obvious example is NAFTA, which could be renegotiated, but no meaningful business in the world will make significant plans that are dependent on a treaty with a five-year sunset clause like he wanted. (The clause was probably about presenting Canada with two options: back out because the treaty is unworkable and dumb at that point, or agree and set up the Republicans to campaign on renegotiating or cancelling it for reelection from the masses while ALSO campaigning on it with their donors getting money in exchange for their promise to renew it)
But still, it would be inaccurate to claim only one country is subsidizing dairy. What's actually happening is bad enough.
It takes resources to do Science; the best thing we've got to create flows of resources is a Free Market.
That's weird, I could have swore that the USSR was the first country in space. I'm also pretty sure that what has made the U.S. such a scientific powerhouse has been tons of federal grant money that flows into our universities for basic research. The free market turns that into money afterward. There's also the issue of all those nifty advancements brought about through NASA's research.
The free market is important, but when you make it the be-all, end-all, you'll find that things don't work out as well as Ayn Rand's stories would have you believe.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Even if I grant your couple of [citation needed] deaths, I wasn't talking about typical low-level friction (and your definition of any death of any soldier anywhere as a "war" is just plain stupid). I specifically said "WWIII", which is well known by everyone, apparently except you, to mean a major, probably nuclear, war amongst superpowers.
We are not now, and have never been, fighting WWIII. Even the Cold War, which had plenty of dead soldiers on all sides, was not WWIII.
So the trump administration is going to be the first administration in the past few decades to negotiate de-nuclearization in North Korea without a senior White House science advisor at the table (or even in the administration, right?
And every other administration for the last few decades has had a senior White House science advisor at the table for such talks, right?
Well, honestly, every prior administration that negotiated with North Korea got rolled and wound up pouring money, aid on North Korea while they kept working on getting the bomb.
Do we really need to repeat the failures of prior administrations? Why didn't the presence of a senior White House science advisor prevent all the prior administrations from signing flawed agreements?
Ken
I work with a lot of physicists. I have three masters degrees myself. There is no such thing a 'scientist' is the sense that there is someone who is qualified advise on nuclear weapons, cybersecurity and AGW. As I said I work with physicist and to many of them think they are competent to speak on any subject, which is of course bollocks.
If you want to know about nuclear weapons find a nuclear weapons expert, who might be a physicist, but more likely is a nuclear engineer or might even be a historian or a political science major, who has specialize in disarmament and disarmament verification.
if you want to know about cybersecurity ask a cybersecurity expert. Having a physicist science adviser and asking them about cybersecurity makes as much sense as asking a biologist or a philosopher.
As for AGW I'm sure there's a propagandist around to give pointers on how to use panic to transfer wealth or you could find someone who knows statistics and model building to explain to the credulous how science really works.
Bernie is not a communist nor was he ever. The delusion seems to be with people like you that cannot hear democratric socialism without it being communism. It has to be black or white. While a lot of Bernie's rhetoric sounded pretty extreme if you knew anything about his history you would know he was quite willing to take small steps towards his goals and be more strategic. That is why you have a lot of the black vote that wrote him off before acknowledging his rapid progress.
I would argue that Bernie did his job for the Democratic party forcing them to rethink their position as they became more and more conservative which was making them less and less electable. Trump on the other hand just did the classic Republican better by using fear tactics that clearly still work.
At least Trump has made politics unpredictable.
Yes, and everyone knows unpredictability is GREAT for the economy and foreign relations!