A few days ago I linked to a video by Sabine Hossenfelder who shared a letter from a colleague warning her not to expose the fact that most academic research papers in particle physics were useless nonsense.
Now she’s followed up that video with one with her thoughts on what will happen when an administration that wants to reduce waste in government starts looking closely at what kinds of research are being funded in the hard sciences. And that’s before we even get to the nonsense that the social sciences call research.
Now Sabine is far from a conservative. She’s a moderate climate change advocate and several other progressive ideas. But she seems to be a realist when it comes to the nonsense being funded in academic research centers.
She advocates for corporate research for anything that will have commercial applications and only sees government funding for things like defense applications and a very small set of other areas.
I agree with her. Government funding of academic research has become a feeding trough for bad science. It has created bloated university faculties doing useless research that benefits no one but the faculty and even they are dissatisfied because they know they’re frauds.
I can’t wait until Musk and DOGE gets to the NSF and the health research funding agencies. It should be a mighty bloodbath. And that will change the universities too, for the better. They’ll be poorer and smaller in the short term but they’ll be healthier and more useful in the long run.
That was an interesting talk. Even to a person as far down the intellectual pole as me with my pitiful little BS degree, it has been obvious that something has been amiss. It just had a feel of the medieval problem of quantifying the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin. I was a lifelong enthusiastic subscriber to Scientific American until around or slightly over 20 years ago when the publication became openly hard leftist. I remember the moment I gave up on the magazine. The mag had hired a new monthly columnist and his… Read more »
I know what you mean. I used to listen to NPR until one day I became so outraged by the lies and self-serving hypocrisy that I almost broke my car radio turning it off. I haven’t intentionally turned on another one of their programs since.
I was a physical chemist before I became a synthetic chemist. The P-Chemists in academia in the 90s were having a contest to see who could do the most useless research.
I wish I was making this up.
Things like: What happens when a particle of X mass and Y velocity strikes a resting particle of the same mass?
The answer is obvious and yet, people were getting grant money to study it.
Burn it down.
Amen. I have great respect for researchers working in industry. They produce specific results needed for actual products. They don’t fill up a tank the size of a small asteroid with liquified argon under the Antarctic ice cap. Let’s see if we can pay for research for a safe and efficient nuclear power plant. Now there’s a thought.