I posted to get an estimate on how bad this damage is, and how preventable it is. It might be a stupid question to someone who knows what's going on, but I really don't understand the hostility towards the fact that it was asked.
Politics is the mind killer. If you happen to be cluless about a charged political issue you shouldn't be suprised when you encouter hostility when you talk about the issue.
I posted to get an estimate on how bad this damage is, and how preventable it is.
If you want to get an accurate estimate it's a bad idea to start by saying "The consequences have already been pretty disastrous". Rationality 101.
Politics is the mind killer. If you happen to be cluless about a charged political issue you shouldn't be suprised when you encouter hostility when you talk about the issue.
I suppose it could be interpreted that way. It's not like anyone wants research to shut down - everyone agrees that research should continue. There's no political faction that wants to cause trouble. We've talked about much more divisive things in the past.
If the question is clueless, I find it rather strange that no one is actually bothering to explain. I've seen much more uninforme...
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)