The American science funding catastrophe​

[John Clark]

Quantum Computer expert Scott Aaronson has this to say about recent actions by Trump:

"There is still a complete freeze on money being disbursed from the US National Science Foundation, it has continued today, despite the fact that Trump supposedly rescinded it yesterday after a mass backlash. If the current freeze drags on for months, tens of thousands of grad students and postdocs will no longer get stipends, and will be forced to quit. Basic science in the US will essentially grind to a halt—and even if it eventually restarts, an entire cohort of young physicists, mathematicians, and biologists will have been lost, while China and other countries race ahead in those fields. Also, even if the funding does restart, the NSF and other federal agencies are now under an indefinite hiring freeze. If not quickly lifted, this will shrink these agencies and cripple their ability to carry out their missions."

"If you voted for Trump because you wanted to take a hammer to the woke deep state or whatever, then please understand: you may or may not have realized you were voting for this, exactly, but this is what you’ve gotten. In place of professionals who you dislike and who are sometimes systematically wrong, the American spaceship is now being piloted by drunken baboons, mashing the controls to see what happens. I hope you like the result."

The American science funding catastrophe

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

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