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Comment on ‘Extremely worrying’: Argentinian researchers reel after election of anti-science president

sj_zero ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

This is the big problem with putting science on a pedestal and proclaiming that everyone ought to just follow what science tells them misses: there's more to running a society than individual measurements and conclusions.

There's economics, there's civics, there's internal politics, there's geopolitics, there's human nature, there's group psychology, and more; and every new angle added to the pile interacts with every other angle on the pile.

Argentina, like many countries, tries to be all things to all people and ends up being nothing to anyone. The high inflation is in large part caused by government largesse. They have massive debt they ran up during the good times that eventually suffocated their government (good times coming to us too soon!) And then they had to spin up the money printer to keep all these commitments. As the number of pesos in existence rises, the number of pesos required to pay for goods and services rise too. It's a hidden tax paid for by everyone who needs to use money and it isn't so hidden in Argentina.

That's how talk of inflation can relate to public funding of science, because Argentina is only funding things by printing money and stealing from everyone who uses money.

One can argue that public funding of many things has a positive impact, but often people proposing such funding don't consider the broader impact of those decisions. Historically, government debt or inflation has had an outsized impact on history. For example, high inflation in the Weimar Republic (caused in large part by crippling war reparations) was one of the big factors that primed the German public to be receptive to the message of the national socialists. The people asking for more funding in the Weimar Republic likely didn't think such an outcome was possible because they didn't consider all the angles of the situation.

This multifaceted view of the world ironically is somewhat contrary to science, which isolates individual variables to understand them better. That way of thinking is science's superpower, but that superpower is a critical weakness when changing one variable can have an effect on millions of other variables that are all interrelated often in non-linear or unintuitive ways.

The insights science gives us are important, no doubt, but if that's all it took then we wouldn't bother with elections, we'd just put our top science people in charge and become the most powerful nations on earth. Instead, ideologies that call themselves "scientific" are also responsible for some of the most terrible atrocities in the history of the world, and more mass suffering and death than every other bad ideology in history combined.

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Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

This is the big problem with putting science on a pedestal and proclaiming that everyone ought to just follow what science tells them misses: there’s more to running a society than individual measurements and conclusions.

There’s economics, there’s civics, there’s internal politics, there’s geopolitics, there’s human nature, there’s group psychology, and more; and every new angle added to the pile interacts with every other angle on the pile.

Literally nothing to do with cutting funding to science. You don’t have to stop funding science to fund these other things, and it is a joke to think any right wing figure who is elected is going to cut science to fund the arts.

That’s how talk of inflation can relate to public funding of science, because Argentina is only funding things by printing money and stealing from everyone who uses money.

Last year the Argentinian government spent $87 billion in USD, but what actually caused inflation for the entire country is giving CONICET $400 million in USD? That does not pass the sniff test.

Historically, government debt or inflation has had an outsized impact on history. For example, high inflation in the Weimar Republic (caused in large part by crippling war reparations) was one of the big factors that primed the German public to be receptive to the message of the national socialists. The people asking for more funding in the Weimar Republic likely didn’t think such an outcome was possible because they didn’t consider all the angles of the situation.

‘If you publicly fund science there will be another Hitler’ passes the sniff test even less.

The insights science gives us are important, no doubt, but if that’s all it took then we wouldn’t bother with elections, we’d just put our top science people in charge and become the most powerful nations on earth.

Good thing you don’t have to do that to publicly fund science?

Instead, ideologies that call themselves “scientific” are also responsible for some of the most terrible atrocities in the history of the world, and more mass suffering and death than every other bad ideology in history combined.

What did CONICET do that you would consider one of the worst atrocities in the history of the world? Because that’s what’s having funding cut.

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- sj_zero ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Spending money you don't have that you print into existence causes inflation which causes lots of bad things. That's a simple fact. The inflation caused by spending money you don't have takes food out of the mouths of the common man. You can twist things up to try to change that fact, but the angry libertarian won the election because the common man thinks big changes need to be made. In the past, the angry guy wasn't a libertarian. Angrily sniff all you want, that's already happened.
  
  You can say "But my thing is special!" yeah, it's special to you. And a lot of stuff is special to the people it applies to. There's welfare programs that'll need to be cut too. I strongly suspect education programs will have to be cut. You're not special, and stuff that's more immediately painful that defunding a science institute will need to happen to bring things back into equilibrium because a lot of cuts need to be made. A lot of more people much more deserving of help are likely to lose that help in the near future. People who don't have high education and careers who can probably pivot into somewhere in the private sector.
  
  There's two phases to spending money you don't have: The part where you spend the money, and the part where you pay the money back (or in this case, the part where you balance the massively unbalanced budget and start the process of monetary tightening). It feels great to spend the money, but it hurts way worse to fix things. Argentina is in terrible shape. High debt at a high interest rate, and it's trying to make up the difference by printing money so their peso is collapsing every year. Because nobody wanted to cut anything because there was such a great argument for spending that money, now a lot of stuff people want will have to be cut to get to equilibrium.
  
  You don't even need to argue with me, I'm just the messenger. This is just the truth of reality in front of you. It isn't going to change anything even if you "win" an argument with me. It won't bring down inflation by one basis point, and it won't change the fact that this guy won the election and might bring in some serious budget cuts just as he was elected to do, including the thing you like.