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Lumifer comments on Should effective altruists care about the US gov't shutdown and can we do anything? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Context: The United States Federal Government has shut down on 18 occasions since 1976 (Source)
Additional context: only one of those shutdowns has involved a significant fraction of the government suspending its operations for more than 5 days.
Before 1980, "shutdowns" followed different rules so that they did not affect government operations nearly as much. Since 1980, every shutdown but one has been 5 days or less. The Clinton-Gingrich shutdown, which began in late 1995, is the only one to last longer (first 5 days, and then 21 more days after a brief truce).
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Is that why you thought I was doing public histerics? I am uninformed, but that much I did know. Just because something has been happening doesn't mean it's okay to let it keep happening.
I'm not implying that society will collapse. I'm saying that research has exponential returns, and as a consequence setbacks that seem small right now might actually be pretty bad. Each one of these 18 occasions could have potentially set us back several years.
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.
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.
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 uninformed questions talked about in the Discussion sections. I guess I seriously underestimated the whole "politics-mindkilling" thing...
Fair point.
Einstein was more productive when it comes to producing scientific breakthrough when he worked in a patent office in 1905 than when he was having big grants.
It's not at all clear whether writing grants to run fancy experiments and then publishing papers that don't replicate to have a high enough publication rate to get further grants helps the scientific project.
Bad example. Einstein was A) doing physics at a time when the size of budgets needed to make new discoveries was much smaller B) primarily doing theoretical work or work that relied on other peoples data. Many areas of research (e.g. much of particle physics, a lot of condensed matter, most biology) require funding for the resources to simply to do anything at all.
I don't think that true.
If you take something like the highly useful discovery that taking vitamin D at the morning is more effective than at the evening that discovery was made in the last decade by amateurs without budjets.
Fermi estimates aren't easy but that discovery might be worth a year of lifespan. If you look at what the Google people are saying solving cancer is worth three years of lifespan. The people who publish breakthrough results in cancer research have replication rates of under 10 percent. Just as Petrov didn't get a nobel peace price, the people advancing human health don't get biology nobel prices.
Relying on other people's data is much easier know that it was in Einsteins time. Open science doesn't go as far as I would like but being able to transfer data easily via computers makes things so much easier.
The fact that most work in biology relies on experiments suggests that there are not enough people doing good theoretical work in the field it. I don't know much about particle phyiscs but I'm not sure whether we need as much smart people doing particle physics as we have at the moment.
So there are two distinct arguments being made: one is a resource allocation argument (it would be better to spend fewer resources right now on things like particle physics) and the second argument is that in many fields one can still make discoveries with few resources. The first argument may have some validity. The second argument ignores how much work is required in most cases. Yes, one can do things like investigate specific vitamin metabolism issues. But if one is interested in say synthesizing new drugs, or investigating how those drugs would actually impact people that requires large scale experiments.
That's not what is going on here. The issue is that biology is complicated. Life doesn't have easy systems that have easy theoretical underpinnings that can be easily computed. There are literally thousands of distinct chemicals in a cell interacting, and when you introduce a new one, even if you've designed it to interact with a specific receptor, it will often impact others. And even if it does only impact the receptor in question, how it does so will matter. You are dealing with systems created by the blind-idiot god.
You are defending a way of doing biology that plagued by various problems. It's a field where people literally believe that they can perceive more when they blind themselves.
There are huge issues in the theoretically underpinning of that approach because the people in the system are too busy writing research that doesn't replicate for top tier journals that requires expensive equipment instead of thinking more about how to approach the field.
So every field has problems, but that doesn't mean those problems are "huge".
Outside view: An entire field which is generally pretty successful at actually finding what is going on is fundamentally misguided about how they should be approaching the field, or the biologists are doing what they can. Biology is hard. But we are making progress in biology at a rapid rate. For example, the use of genetic markers to figure out how to treat different cancers was first proposed in the early 1990s and is now a highly successful clinical method.