The Moon landing line is a pretty important thing to study, actually, since we know what the rehearsed line was: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Without that “a” it’s a very silly line.
Armstrong for years claimed he said the line right and that it must’ve been garbled in the radio transmission, and in recent years has been vindicated as better signal:noise algorithms processed the recording and found the missing word. Researchers aren’t blowing money to find out if Armstrong was a liar, they’re using it to develop more sensitive receivers, better transmission protocols, and more advanced algorithms to parse signal out of noise, all of which have massive impacts in other domains. An algorithm that’s better at parsing data out of noise in particular is going to be useful in loads of places like MRI machines where improving resolution will take billions in research but improving parsing is just updating the software.
That’s exactly what I was wondering. Simple objective, very difficult problem, maybe have to invent new algorithms. Kind of like this:
instead give it directly to Elon, he will know what to do with the extra money!
This is a regularly done conservative tactic. Attack research because it’s frequently stupid sounding. But sometimes stupid sounding research leads to incredible things.
Sometimes you research the mating habits of red eyed tree frogs and you learn a lot for conservation efforts and stuff about the species. Conservatives love this because they can hand wave and go “who cares about this thing I personally don’t care about”
But those science nerds sometimes do stuff like researching gila venom in the 70s which eventually led to ozempic now, one of the potential major treatments for t2 diabetes, a scourge of our morbidly obese modern society. This has gigantic positive implications for public health and financial benefits
The whole point is you can’t know until you’re done what will be groundbreaking
Take literally any scientific idea and you can easily imagine a conservative mocking it.
“They want to male a huge bomb, sit on it, and go to space!”
“They’re looking at mold from their days old sandwiches and call it science!”
I tried googling whether penicillin was mocked “pencillin was mocked as stupid” just out of interest. The third result (or first after “people also ask”) on Google, The Stupid Reason That Elon Musk Is Complaining About Scientists Spraying Bobcat Urine on Alcoholic Rats
Around and around and around
It’s an even more fundamental conservative tactic. What they do is find a single example of something they think they can easily deride and hold it up as representative of that entire thing. Think welfare, immigration, criminal justice, reproductive rights, gender identity, and much more. Right wing media is full of single cases they beat into their viewerships’ minds while ignoring all other cases
I heard the explanation “conservatives stop thinking if they like the current result”.
If immigrants committed any crime, the obvious solution is to deport all of them. Less immigrants, less crime, sounds great, no further research needed.
But if it’s about something like social security, they go to the ninth layer of indirection to “prove” that it’s bad, because now they found a study that slightly agrees with one of their talking points (p ≈ room temperature).
They don’t want groundbreaking though, unless it’s profitable. They want people to suffer unless they can profit from their relief. They don’t want the government funding this sort of research. They want the government funding their companies that then perform this sort of research at a 5000% mark-up.
Hey E-L-O-N , y’know what else the government spends an exorbitant amount of money on? Go on, take a guess.
This isn’t about efficiency, it’s about attacking science as a tool for evaluating truth. It’s a way to discredit the authority of expertise and shape the course of research with selective funding and demonization.
Especially if you’d add up all the inefficiencies already introduced in the name of efficiency. All those grant proposals, superfluous fluff articles to bump impact factors, etc. are all required overhead to game a system designed to seem efficient.
I think it’s because Elon Musk just really wanted to be the head of a department called “D.O.G.E.”. The whole attacking science thing is just a bonus.
Yeah how much is this “office” going to cost the taxpayers? I would guess a lot more than $100k on a sunfish experiment.
Elon Musk: now singlehandedly responsible for the US falling further behind China in innovation and research (for the record, fuck the CCP).
I seriously hope the UK takes advantage and offers visas and funding for the research. We’ve already got a good research sector though it took a hit from Brexit. Taking in these US scientists, even if it’s only for four years, would accelerate the UK’s growth, suck it Yanks!
p.s. also the EU would love to have them as well.
How much do we pay for politicians and their security to go golfing?
I personally don’t think that politicians should be given elaborate security details. Their performance or lack of performance should determine how safe they are from the populace they’re tasked with serving.
Ehhh, with a large enough population you’re bound to find someone crazy enough to do it for no reason at all.
It’s terrifying how easy it is to manipulate a population that’s so biscously anti intellectual.
This is the dunning Kruger effect in real life. They’re too stupid to understand science so they assume science doesn’t make any sense.
I’m sure they would consider it a waste to “measure bubbles in antarctic sea ice” because they don’t understand that’s what climate models are based on and vindicated by. And even if they did understand it theyd still be against it.
It’s tough because obviously as communists you have to try to maintain a belief everybody is deserving of basic dignity and respect but then you see somebody yell “don’t you fucking tell me what to do” as they climb over the “do not enter, high voltage” sign of a substation.
It’s a lot harder to maintain the belief that any loss of life is a tragedy when you have a guy in a klan robe saying it’s their constitutional right to to wrap their lips around the exhaust pipe of a diesel truck specifically modified to cause as many emissions as humanly possible.
Sunfish I can’t find the actual study, it appears it was done in 1975, and was a big thing that congress at the time used as the examples of wasteful spending.
First 2 I can’t really say the value or lack of value of. I mean they were studies on effects of dangerous substances on behavior. and yes of course like all studies you pick animals that you might be able to get the effects of. Obviously a lot of science is just randomly probing around looking for oddities that give you a hypothesis to try and refine later into something useful. Obviously addictive substances is an important topic to understand, and poking around randomly might actually give solutions that could be discovered IMO.
Now the last one is the only one I’d agree, isn’t exactly super useful.
was done in 2016.
All that being said… lets also take a serious statement on cost here… a million dollars in 2016. That’s like, 15 minutes of iraq war money.
Another comment explains the moon landing one. It’s a hexbear comment and probably not federated to a lot of instances, so copying it here:
The Moon landing line is a pretty important thing to study, actually, since we know what the rehearsed line was: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Without that “a” it’s a very silly line.
Armstrong for years claimed he said the line right and that it must’ve been garbled in the radio transmission, and in recent years has been vindicated as better signal:noise algorithms processed the recording and found the missing word. Researchers aren’t blowing money to find out if Armstrong was a liar, they’re using it to develop more sensitive receivers, better transmission protocols, and more advanced algorithms to parse signal out of noise, all of which have massive impacts in other domains. An algorithm that’s better at parsing data out of noise in particular is going to be useful in loads of places like MRI machines where improving resolution will take billions in research but improving parsing is just updating the software.
Can’t really blame people for defederating though. It’s a slog to find the treasure in the shit. In this same thread there’s both “Death to America” and “kill all honkeys” non-sequiturs. I can see why they drove off their admins in a stupid struggle session recently. I’m just waiting for another struggle session when they discover the etymology of “bad” and have to rename !badposting@hexbear.net:
It is possibly from Old English derogatory term bæddel and its diminutive bædling “effeminate man, hermaphrodite, pederast,” which probably are related to bædan “to defile.”
wow, yeah thanks for the repost of it then, and yeah seems even further to go in there, when conservatives comb for examples of the terrible things they are fighting… and it seems like over and over again, even their cherry picked examples seem to fail
How much is it gonna cost us to create this new “D.O.G.E.” Department and pay Musk? The cost of these studies is completely irrelevant to the situation, like others have said the GOP props up ridiculous situations and makes it seem like they represent the entire situation, and they do it to disguise what they’re doing which is fleecing taxpayers money to private corps.
Studying fly development has led to cancer treatments targeting the sonic hedgehog pathway.
This is the predictable outcome of empowering ignorance. When your opinion is as valid as my facts, bad things are going to happen.
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Science inherently involves the reproduction of work that’s already been done. That’s how the process ensures reproducibility. Talking about the efficiency of science makes very little sense because the savings bought by science are privatized, viewed like externalities.
I never knew pregnancy tests had frogs in them. The sticks seem so small.
There are some smol frogs out there
Those are usually the scary ones to piss on, unless it’s a tree frog in which case you have to factor in the dexterity.
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Lol owned
whoever reported this, you’re cringe and you post cringe
Death to America
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Here’s the tweet in question: https://xcancel.com/DOGE/status/1858540521096089876#m
Anyone know what studies it’s referring to?
