Billions of dollars have been wiped from research budgets, almost 8,000 grants have been cancelled at NIH and the US National Science Foundation alone, and more than 1,000 NIH employees have been fired.
Normal people in the US MASSIVELY underestimate the damage that has been done to the US by destroying science as a career here, it is sickening and to be honest makes it really hard to even want to try to be a part of this shit society in any meaningful way.
The US is racing towards collapse and scientific institutions included but the real collapse story here is the fact that everybody seems resigned to just letting science go away as if it was a fun hobby and not an existentially necessary pillar holding society up and bulwarking our "economic productivity" with new tools, new perspectives and new safeguards to prevent natural catastrophe from robbing us of success.
That is what I will remember most about this time, that the average person in my society sees supporting science with actual money as something akin to getting distracted about sending cool robots to Mars because it is exciting (which is cool and I think we should do it, but a different argument fundamentally then say funding basic vaccine research).
No, many many many of us will die because we have destroyed the funding of science in the US, many are already dying and yet in the midst of this wave of violence try talking to the average USian and they will act like it is a detail that science has been destroyed here, not one of the primary emergencies.
"We have to focus on the economy" US centrists say brushing the blowing out of the keystone piece of the US economy and basic cohesion of systems within it completely out of frame to focus on abstract fabricated ideas like GDP or stocks or some other nearly meaningless factor with respect to our daily lives.
Collapse is many things, but it is always a product of a refusal to listen in favor of orbiting a comforting theology without examining it closely enough to be disappointed.
Why is it relevant? You are falling prey to a similar logical fallacy that people do with evolution by assuming that the path of evolution is always towards more complexity.
Most people probably do believe that evolution always leads to more complexity, the classic image of an ape evolving to a human walking upright is rooted in the center of most people's subconscious understanding of how complexity arises and evolves within systems that variously reward it.
In reality however that is a serious thinking error, evolution can be a forcing towards more or less complexity, it depends on the environment. Similarly, Science does not necessarily produce more complexity nor does it value it as a product, to the contrary a major concern of Science is often taking a whole set of half explanations that fit together in confounding, complex and contradicting ways and resolving them into a comparatively elegant theory that gets to the heart of the nature of the thing trying to be understood.
You seem to be locked into a belief that Science leads to more and more complexity necessarily and that assumption fails at a philosophical level before we even get into specifics.
Pseudo-Science which abounds and is always trying to drown us in self-inflicted suffering is a form of complexity, false beliefs grounded in nothing that require very specific rules to be followed with no real explanation are complexity (hence why we came up with the term "Cargo Cult"), overly oppressive theological ideologies are complex and brutalize people through their arbitrary complexity. Science is often the only way to defang these forms of complexity and the answers Science gives are often far less "complicated" than the bullshit people come up with to explain things they can't explain.
Ok, wait a second.
WHAT is complexity in this context? Define please.
Complexity =/= complicated. You are going off on a reaction without even understanding my argument or the conceptual framework I'm coming in from.
If wasn't 100% correct in the analysis that scientific production requires complexity, then you have no complaint about modern government funding major institutions to go acquire more knowledge, your issue is moot. Just go do science. Einstein worked in a patent office. What's the issue?
You define it, it makes my head hurt thinking about it.
To put it another way, complexity is the encapsulating border we cannot decipher.
Complexity is ~entanglement.
Nobody is going to make a new Elegant Non-complicated Theory without the following:
Etc etc.
This is NOT newton getting hit on the head by an apple kind of "processes".
Complexity is a hidden tax.
Good thing then that Science, Math and to be fair Sailors too pursue an understanding of knots isn't it?
Do you need Einstein if you can not and will not pay for nuclear power stations?
I realize how you will hear and understand that as an "anti-science" stance, but I'm actually from a science background. That's not my purpose.
Yes, one thousand times yes, I would be desperately sad if the knowledge Einstein and the other physicists his work built on and integrated had not culminated in the Theory Of General Relativity.
How beautiful is a theory that could predict something as strange and mystifying as Black Holes before we ever even saw them? How beautiful is that Science has allowed us to understand electromagnetic radiation so we could see deep into space and "see" a Black Hole in the first place?
Sharpening of the original EHT imaging of the M87 black hole, using the PRIMO technique for interferometric modeling. The rightmost image adds back in some fuzzing to account for the limited resolving power of the underlying observations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87
By the way the differences between Classical Newtonian Physics and the ideas introduced by Einstein's General Relativity Theory aren't just academic. Modern GPS systems function as precisely as they do because they account for time dilation, which is something that only General Relativity helped us perceive as a phenomena of nature around us. Without the Theory Of General Relativity using satellites to determine the position of things so ships don't crash into rocks and kill their crews, people can be rescued who are lost in the wilderness and a host of other immensely necessary things would be a hopelessly complex process of accounting for seemingly chaotic deviations in the clocks on satellites and the clocks on the surface of the earth.
In otherwords, The Theory Of General Relativity made the universe less complex to understand and predict. So yes Nuclear Power or no Nuclear Power I am grateful for Einstein and the other scientists that helped make those discoveries happen, what you are pointing to is tangential to the basic utility of UNDERSTANDING nature as it focuses on raw power not on resolving obscurity into clarity.
The mere idea of inhabiting a world view as cynical as yours gives me the shivers, eew.
I'm used to seeing this kind of benighted narrow-mindedness applied to the arts ("Who needs artists, poets or musicians when they don't make number go up?") but it's startling to see someone apply it to the whole of science ("Who needs to understand the world when it doesn't make number go up?"). Oh well, every time someone asks them for a clarification they seem to reply "it's all out there, do your own research" so they go into the category of timewaster if not outright troll.
So science is telling us we either bend or break.
Bend means stopping growth and new knowledge production.
Breaking is to push further. Like every new piece of knowledge will be applied to accelerating the damage to the environment and drawing in more planetary boundaries.
The end of growth is guaranteed either way, right?
Science 101 is that the fruit flies in the jar die. Are humans able to consciously reduce their impacts below the carrying capacity or will nature do it for us? Both paths are valid solutions.
I'd argue that you have a cynical view from the perspective that the planet is finite. The theory of black holes will not outlive the last human alive. It's cynical to kill the humans not yet alive through a fairy tale religious fervor.
There are three ways of looking at it.
I don't want to get the medical test in case it's a bad diagnosis. I'll just be happy.
I'll get the test, but if I don't like the result I'll just take alternate treatments, not update my will and be happy. Person #2 isn't in literal denial, but they deny the meaning of what they know. Implicatory denial.
I'll get the test, get my affairs in order, and live realistically.
I'd argue that you are arguing for #2, and I'm arguing for #3. That's ok, we can disagree.