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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 25 Oct \ parent \ on: War, Taxes, and the National Science Foundation science
Sounds like exciting times in your field. I'm glad to hear it.
What I've seen, and heard others complain about, is that it becomes hard to challenge orthodoxy when everyone's marching in lockstep. It's too dangerous to be in disagreement with potential reviewers. The areas I've worked and studied in have been highly politicized, which adds a very toxic element to those already flawed incentives.
If your field is making lots of tangible progress, that's not a huge problem, but it becomes one if an ideological pivot is needed.
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42 sats \ 1 reply \ @south_korea_ln 25 Oct
Yeah, condensed matter is not really political. There is no orthodoxy to challenge. A material either superconducts or doesn't. You can conclusively prove it1. That's very different from climate science, let's say.

Footnotes

  1. well, this is maybe the one example where we have some controversy, but what's science without a few scammers2 to make fun of. ↩
  2. Jan Hendrik Schon, I did enjoy going down your rabbit hole of scams ↩
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 25 Oct
A material either superconducts or doesn't.
In econ, our version of this is "A transaction is either voluntary or it isn't." We know that voluntary transactions are welfare enhancing (in expectation and subject to some other caveats), while involuntary transactions are not welfare enhancing (again, subject to a bunch of caveats and clarifications).
That's where the absolutist and seemingly extreme views on this stuff come from. Government funded anything is involuntary and therefor unlikely to be welfare enhancing.
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