Trump Slashing The Cancerous “The Science” Bloat: Cut Cut Cut!

My joy is great. And growing:

I responded on Twitter (follow me): “You might not know it, but this is a MAJOR VICTORY of outstanding proportions. Overhead is what fed the administrative beast. Overhead paid for DIE. Overhead paid for assistants to the assistants to the assistant Deans for development. Kill the Beast by starving it.”

For those new to grants, the overhead is the amount tacked on by the researchers’ institution to a researcher’s grant. If a Harvard grant is for, say, \$1 million, an amount already bloated for all the usual reasons of excess, then the amount NIH pays to Harvard is \$1,690,000. That extra \$690,000 feeds the Beast. The Beast grows and causes the original grant totals to swell, for reasons not directly related to the research, like increased salaries for all and such like. Bureaucrats are spawned from the overhead funds. They emerge from their pods with gaping maws mewing to be fed—fed—fed! Overhead is a slow-motion monster movie.

(If you want more detail on overhead, this is a good article.)

Now I know this next part will make no sense to you, but not all are taking well the splendiferous news overhead will be treated like a bikinied teenager in a Wes Craven movie. The far-left politics journal Science screamed “NIH slashes overhead payments for research, sparking outrage“. “Outrage”, as we have said many times, is the second of only two emotions a woke can express. The first being smug self-satisfaction. They don’t get the first anymore, though.

The subtitle of that article should be set to music: “Move to cut indirect cost rate to 15% could cost universities billions of dollars”. I can already sing this.

Or take as representative lead covid panicker Eric Fing-Ding. Through sweet, sweet tears, he tweeted (among other things) that the cuts will “COMPLETELY DECIMATE MEDICAL & PUBLIC HEALTH RESEARCH”.

Bad news.

Bad, because we’d like the effect to be greater than a mere measly ten percent. We need to whack, with pitiless remorseless brutality, at least half of governmental science funding. The Science article was more hopeful. They said “‘This is a surefire way to cripple lifesaving research and innovation,’ said a statement from the Council on Governmental Relations (COGR)”.

Crippling is much better than decimating.

If you’re smiling, stop. Because if you don’t, you’ll break your mouth, stretching it past what’s humanly smileable after this next story. This is from the lefty Ars Technica: “White House budget proposal could shatter the National Science Foundation“.

During an emotional all-hands meeting on Tuesday, the agency’s assistant director for engineering, Susan Margulies, told agency employees to expect between a quarter and a half of its staff to be laid off within the coming months, E&E News reported.

It sure is emotional. Boy am I happy. And happiness is an emotion.

Bring on the pain. Their pain. Universities have had it good too long. And we’ve had it bad.

How many peer-reviewed grant-funded lousy science papers have you and I reviewed together these last dozen or so years, dear reader? Science is broken: read and watch this. How many times have I, and our friends, showed that the very methods used by science are flat out wrong or ridiculously over-certain? (And why aren’t you taking my Class?)

DIE must die a horrible visibly painful death. Emblematic is this funded 2022 idiocy: “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: a case study”. Forget just cutting the authors’ funding. The people who wrote this paper should be fired. Those who okayed grant money for it should be fired. Their Deans should be fired. The rooms they occupied must be fumigated and sealed for a period no less than 10 years.

It’s not only your old Uncle Sergeant Briggs saying this. Here’s a ripe pull from “The natural selection of bad science” by Paul E Smaldino and Richard McElreath. These fellas are not critiquing cellar-dwelling simulacra of science, like say sociology, but what’s taken as the good stuff, like medicine (my emphasis):

Many prominent researchers believe that as much as half of the scientific literature—not only in medicine, by also in psychology and other fields—may be wrong. Fatal errors and retractions, especially of prominent publications, are increasing. The report that emerged from this symposium echoes the slogan of one anonymous attendee: ‘Poor methods get results.’ …

This paper argues that some of the most powerful incentives in contemporary science actively encourage, reward and propagate poor research methods and abuse of statistical procedures.

Boy, howdy, do they ever.

These are not the only ones on the inside saying these things. The word is out. Science has gone bad: “A 2015 British Academy of Medical Sciences report suggested that the false discovery rate in some areas of biomedicine could be as high as 69 percent.”

Here’s a guy who estimates that 1 in 7 science papers are fake: “a preliminary approximation is that 1 in 7 published papers have serious errors commensurate with being untrustworthy.” I don’t vouch for the number, but it wouldn’t surprise anybody if it were true, or even to0 low. The vast amounts of money shoved into the system guarantee fraud like this.

Too low? Yes: too low. Quote: “A 2020 paper showed that of 500 randomized controlled trials analyzed, half contained fake data and a quarter were purely fabricated (‘zombie trials’).” Funded by you.

Data Republican says: “Universities are among the largest drains on taxpayer money in my dataset. They receive massive funding from NGOs and USAID, and they take more government grants on top of that. Meanwhile, anonymous professors have reported to me that true scientific research is stagnating due to DEI mandates and administrative bloat.”

Pampered Steven Pinker whined “Trump’s slashing of NIH grant overhead payments is not pressure toward efficiency but a middle finger to universities.” He’s right. It is. A well deserved finger. Eisenhower was right. Science with-a-capital-S has grown too big, too smug, too coddled. I reject Pinker’s tacit premise that government must be the only main funder of science. Or the main trainer of scientists. Especially, as we have seen, the government (the one Pinker desired and danced for) was utterly corrupt.

And, say, have you take the “climate change” challenge? This shows any bad thing is caused or exacerbated by “climate change”, a ridiculous, but well funded, notion. That science is rotted through and through, parts only existing to funnel money to “green” “solutions”. The reproducibility crisis? (See this.) How about The Science of carving up children so that moms can brag their son is now their daughter? Have we all forgotten The Science of the covid panic?

The only way to rid ourselves of this stuff is to stop feeding those producing it. We need to force a restructuring and rethinking. The old ways need to go. The only way to do this is to cause pain. Minor course corrections are not enough. Cut, cut, and cut some more. Make it sting.

Understand: universities were ground zero for the DIE zombie invasion. And much worse. A tsunami of bad ideas flowed from universities over the last century. Many of those responsible are still employed there. These people need to be made to go. It’s not only DIE, but the base bloat caused by government micro-managing science. It is government, almost completely, that decided what got funded, and funded to ridiculous levels. This forced consensus-based science upon us. This has stifled much innovation, as we have seen time and again. It must be made to change, for change won’t come from within.

Now that 15% might eventually rise, given the wounded howling coming from universities (an AFMR email said “We have also launched an E-Action Alert to engage the broader scientific community and mobilize support for advocacy efforts to reverse or mitigate these changes.”), but the rate must fall. The NIH and NSF budgets need to treated like the mess they are.

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