I dunno, I think the interrupting of scientific experiments all across the US is pretty disastrous, in terms of long term effects. The positive downstream effects of scientific research should not be underestimated, and a large scale disruption of that seems bad.
As I said, I'm not terribly well informed about this. Is there something I'm not considering about the extent of the interruption?
Here at a major research-focused university, work goes on as if nothing happened for now.
There are however possibly going to be snarls in the grant-application process if this goes on for a while and much of my lab's funding does come from the federal government in one way or another, causing further problems in the event of truly long showdowns. I don't know the grant distribution schedule off the top of my head.
Luckily we have all our new expensive equipment on hand as of a few months ago and ongoing costs are for things like yeast extract and disposabl...
For those who haven't heard, NIH and NSF are no longer processing grants, leading to many negative downstream effects.
I've been directing my attention elsewhere lately and don't have anything informative to say about this. However, my uninformed intuition is that people who care about effective altruism (research in general, infrastructure development, X-risk mitigation, life-extension...basically everything, actually) or have transhumanist leanings should be very concerned.
The consequences have already been pretty disastrous. To provide just one, immediate example, the article says that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has shut down. I think that this is almost certain to directly cause a nontrivial number of deaths. Each additional day that this continues could have huge negative impact down the line, perhaps delaying some key future discoveries by years. This event *might* be a small window of opportunity to prevent a lot of harm very cheaply.
So the question is:
1) Can we do anything to remedy the situation?
2) If so, is it worth doing it? (Opportunity costs, etc)