1mo ago

Frog's Gift

77 comments

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.
- 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.
- 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.

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 that most people aren’t personally impacted by”
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
- 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).
  
  It's used by every group to deride anythign they disagree with, just oversimplify things until they sound stupid.
- 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
  
  The Stupid Reason That Elon Musk Is Complaining About Scientists Spraying Bobcat Urine on Alcoholic Rats
  Pretty sure they cribbed most of that article from This Hank Green video from the same day. It's a message worth spreading though, to be fair.
- 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.
- The Game Theory was considered useless at the time.
  It prevented a Nuclear WW3 for so many years.
  And it will still prevent stuff from going nuclear until enough world government officials become foolish enough to be unable to understand it.

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.

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:

Take that, already meager science budget! They will definitely be used to make society better.
- Thank God we are cutting out this wasteful science. It will pay for half of an F-35. We're buying an extra F-35, of course, so it's a net loss, but our budget is unlimited for the military.
- I'm thinking the outcome of this may be even more sinister.
  I know there is already plenty of corporate hands in science, doing what they can to fund research they want and making it more difficult for potentially damning results to come out.
  Fun wild experiments won't go away, they'll still get funded, but only at the mercy of the corporation that bankrolls their study.

We spend about 90 Billion dollars on corporate welfare each year.
90 Billion.
Yeah but let's focus on the rounding errors.
The Department of Government Efficiency is going to increase the efficacy of giving taxpayer money to the ultra wealthy.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4263280/#%3A%7E%3Atext=Results+showed+that+male+quail%2Ctest+%28Coc+%E2%86%92+Sal%29.
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.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2033014/feds-blow-700k-to-find-out-what-really-happened-on-the-moon/
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
  
  Excellent comment ruined by using the conservative instance.
- 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.
  
  I was furious when I learned about the "Schools are offering litter boxes to trans students who identify as cats!"
  Not because it was a lie, but because it was based on truth.
  The truth? Schools in areas with heavy gun violence now have litter boxes so that pooping can be done in the advent of a school shooting.
  It's absurd, but because of a problem the Right made, not because of a "misguided solution" of the Left

Musk continues to demonstrate loud and clear that he is none of the things he claims to be.
- Spoiled rich boy who wants to be president and figured out how? Rumor is he hasn’t left trumps side since the win.
  He’s an investor and salesman. Given the way he treats his workers, I’d bet money on him being a douche to waitstaff.

It's like the two dumbest kids in your middle school were the only ones that ran for school elections and now they spout inane shit you have to ignore, except they control nukes.
- Nah, there was another contender, but they were a fuckin' nerd with big, scary words and headachy sentences and got bullied out of the race.
  (The nerd is a general analogy to reasonable people, not any specific person or group)

Well, that was something that benefitted women, so it's clearly not efficient for any of the grey, white men in this committee
- Knowing your wife is pregnant definitely benefits men too.
  
  As if any of them give the first fuck about any of their spawn
  ETA: wait, whoops, forgot Trump wants to fuck his daughter
- including trans women, which they also hate
  
  That's not true. The rethoric is easily explained. They're not women if you can't "grab them by the pussy"
  
  They hate women; ergo they hate trans women.

Anyone remember the early days of Musk's Twitter takeover?
"I don't know what this 'microservice' nonsense is, I'm gonna remove it"
"...Sir, everything is fucking broken now, could you please stop messing with the system"
"Ur fired lol"
...Expect more of that.
- Or the server move

just wait until they find out how much a bomb costs...

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.
- That's nice and all, but progress isnt tied to the idea that trash needs to be respected. It is more important that every deserving personlive a decent life than it is to give those animals what they well and truly deserve (which is what we are all currently getting anyway). They should get a standard minimum quality of life because it is the easiest way to ensure those that do deserve it get it.

Studying fly development has led to cancer treatments targeting the sonic hedgehog pathway.

instead give it directly to Elon, he will know what to do with the extra money!

808 Billion for maintaining an army

Doesn't "DOGE" literally have a budget of nothing?

Wait until they hear how much military aviation spends on screws.

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.

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.

Hey E-L-O-N , y'know what else the government spends an exorbitant amount of money on? Go on, take a guess.

Here's the tweet in question: https://xcancel.com/DOGE/status/1858540521096089876#m
Anyone know what studies it's referring to?

It also can't be understated how much private corporations benefit from technology this research yields. We spent $25 billion ($175 billion in today's money) on the Apollo programs alone, and NASA research has led to everything from cell phones and laptops to the rubber molding process used for sneakers. The DoD wasted a ton of money in the 80s on this new technology that involved getting computers to communicate with each other, and now we have the internet.
The government spends money in ways that could never be justified by cooperations, then the cooperations enrich themselves with that research and use the profits to lobby Congress for lower taxes and limited spending. It's absolutely infuriating.

I think many of these people would be perfectly happy for a woman to not have definitive knowledge about whether or not she's pregnant. I suspect there might be some overlap with the group that's trying to get rid of all contraception and abortion measures.
- they don't need to know they're pregnant, the body has ways of shutting that down