{"id":1340,"date":"2013-04-25T12:57:18","date_gmt":"2013-04-25T17:57:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1340"},"modified":"2017-01-12T16:32:17","modified_gmt":"2017-01-12T21:32:17","slug":"i-was-right-congresss-attack-on-the-nsf-widens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1340","title":{"rendered":"I was right: Congress’s attack on the NSF widens"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month, I blogged about<\/a> Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) passing an amendment blocking the National Science Foundation from funding most political science research.\u00a0 I wrote:<\/p>\n

This sort of political interference with the peer-review process, of course, sets a chilling precedent for all<\/em> academic research, regardless of discipline.\u00a0 (What\u2019s next, an amendment banning computer science research, unless it has applications to scheduling baseball games or slicing apple pies?)<\/p>\n

In the comments section<\/a> of that post, I was pilloried by critics, who ridiculed my delusional fears about an anti-science witch hunt.\u00a0 Obviously<\/em>, they said, Congressional Republicans only wanted to slash dubious social<\/em> science research: not computer science or the other hard sciences that people reading this blog really<\/em> care about, and that everyone agrees are worthy.\u00a0 Well, today I write to inform you that I was right, and my critics were wrong.\u00a0 <\/strong>For the benefit of readers who might have missed it the first time, let me repeat that:<\/p>\n

I was right, and my critics were wrong.<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In this case, like in countless others, my “paranoid fears” about what could<\/em> happen turned out to be preternaturally well-attuned to what would<\/em> happen.<\/p>\n

According to an article in Science<\/em><\/a>, Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the new chair of the ironically-named House Science Committee, held two hearings in which he “floated the idea of having every NSF grant application [in every field] include a statement of how the research, if funded, ‘would directly benefit the American people.’ ”\u00a0 Connoisseurs of NSF proposals will know that every proposal already includes a “Broader Impacts” section, and that that section often borders on comic farce.\u00a0 (“We expect further progress on the \u03bc-approximate shortest vector problem to enthrall middle-school students and other members of the local community, especially if they happen to belong to underrepresented groups.”)\u00a0 Now progress on the \u03bc-approximate shortest vector problem also has to directly—directly<\/em>—“benefit the American people.”\u00a0 It’s not enough for such research to benefit science—arguably the least bad, least wasteful enterprise<\/em> our sorry species has ever managed—and for science, in turn, to be a principal engine of the country’s economic and military strength, something that generally can’t<\/em> be privatized because of a tragedy-of-the-commons problem, and something that economists say has repaid public investments many, many times over.\u00a0 No, the benefit now needs to be “direct.”<\/p>\n

The truth is, I find myself strangely indifferent to whether Smith gets his way or not.\u00a0 On the negative side, sure, a pessimist might worry that this could spell the beginning of the end for American science.\u00a0 But on the positive side, I would have been proven so massively right<\/strong> that, even as I held up my “Will Prove Quantum Complexity Theorems For Food” sign on a street corner or whatever, I’d have something to crow about until the end of my life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month, I blogged about Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) passing an amendment blocking the National Science Foundation from funding most political science research.\u00a0 I wrote: This sort of political interference with the peer-review process, of course, sets a chilling precedent for all academic research, regardless of discipline.\u00a0 (What\u2019s next, an amendment banning computer science research, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,16,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nerd-interest","category-rage-against-doofosity","category-the-fate-of-humanity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3125,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions\/3125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}