You're either blithely (in fact, stupidly given electoral results this past decade) assuming everyone shares your normative goals and values, or you just asked ChatGPT to write you a "kritik" like some kid in a school debate league.
Edited: I think what's really going on is that you've internalized oppression so as to be so cynical and toxically jealous that someone else online can actually blithely/stupidly say what they think on a Sunday afternoon. Because you're professional working at a university, and you can't just do that and speak out. Noam Chomsky famously described this behavior amongst his peers.
I'm Asian American and LGBT+, and I was privileged by an advanced formal education. So, yes, I literally have a different set of values and goals than you. So you should just try to read it in good faith, I have made no such assumption rather my comment laid out those issues for you to think about. Unless you are doing the old "rules of rational discussion are for me, not for thee"? Surely you're not that sort of antiintellectual reactionary.
And to the other possibility, you're just writing an insult, so the problem there is you and your emotional regulation, and you are responsible for that.
Going back, it's quite the opposite, when the other commenter framed "identity politics" and "meritocracy", they were committing the very error you have ignorantly accused me of. Thus you are just engaging in projection. Not to mention the ("kritik" conservative's dogwshistle).
Thus, the fact that you are lacking in critical thinking skills today does not excuse you from such intellectually prejudiced remarks.
And finally, your reference to "electoral results" tells me you didn't read through my comment, and are pigeonholing me as one type of left-American Democrat or another, of which I have provided enough commentary in the original comment that I could not be one.
So as much as you were trying to suggest the problem is on my end, the problem is with you and your narrowminded (and frankly, one with a racist tenor because surely you would not have said that comment to my face) reply,
eli_gottlieb. It's too bad you're actually a postdoc, if I were an evil SJW or Democrat (or whatever politics it was you were insinuating) I'd be cancelling you through your own institution or something.
If you are a conservative, further discussion is going to be pointless. If you are Bernie/AOC/other leftist then I'll chalk it up to you basically misreading what I wrote.
Wow, you think Bernie and AOC are the limits of the spectrum at that end?
> So as much as you were trying to suggest the problem is on my end, the problem is with you and your narrowminded (and frankly, one with a racist tenor because surely you would not have said that comment to my face) reply, eli_gottlieb. It's too bad you're actually a postdoc, if I were an evil SJW or Democrat (or whatever politics it was you were insinuating) I'd be cancelling you through your own institution or something.
Oh yeah, you're asking ChatGPT for kritiks. Fuck off.
> She also said that, while cancelled grants may cause serious disruption to labs, jobs and students, the plaintiffs hadn't met the high legal bar for proving "irreparable harm" needed to justify emergency relief.
Bit on the nose that American law does not seem to consider mass layoffs and the indefinite downsizing of an entire industry to be irreparable harm to those affected.
"irreparable harm" in this case is a legal term of art, which sort of translates to "cannot be fixed by *any* amount of money later". If you lose a job for 5 years, work a minimum wage burger flipper job, and then win a $100 million judgement, you're more or less made whole in the eyes of the court.
So losing a grant is probably more along those lines, in the context of "irreparable harm" for an injunction.
You could make the argument (and I'm guessing it was?) that for scientific grants specifically, if the goal isn't money in the first place, and the lack of grant makes a scientific career impossible to fix later even with any amount of money (say grants 10x as large), then maybe you meet "irreparable harm"? I don't know if the courts would buy that.
Spot on. And the inverse - forcing the govt to dispense the grant is not reversible. Once that money is spent in buying equipment, salaries etc. it's not coming back.
> You could make the argument (and I'm guessing it was?) that for scientific grants specifically, if the goal isn't money in the first place, and the lack of grant makes a scientific career impossible to fix later even with any amount of money (say grants 10x as large), then maybe you meet "irreparable harm"?
I think I'd agree with that, yes. I'd even go as far as to argue that you've caused irreparable harm to the public insofar as the grants specifically would have funded open-access publications.
If destroy a department, money does not bring it back to life. It disposes of its materials, disperses its personnel, and loses its laboratory. Unless somebody volunteers to keep your data, it gets lost.
And if you're working in biology, samples and research animals will be literally dead.
Perhaps you could explain one more thing for me. How did the filing lawyer make such a (seemingly) elementary mistake? Why wasn't it caught earlier (by the judge, by their colleagues, by anybody with an interest in this case)?
Um, this seems ass-backwards to me. If some grant is denied when it should've been approved, the only harm that should be considered is "was this money allocated to the research?"... not "was this researcher's career harmed?". We do not allocate grant money to further the career goals of academics. The public and the government that represents it have zero interest in furthering anyone's careers.
In the US legal system in general, the interests of the government are not trump cards. If the law says that the government should pay you $1000, it doesn't matter whether the public or the government feel they have an interest in paying you, nor whether some executive official thinks the original purpose of that law is served by paying you.
In this case, the law does give the executive some discretion to decide based on their priorities whether they really owe you $1000, but the plaintiffs argue the NSF has exceeded that discretion.
> Um, this seems ass-backwards to me. If some grant is denied when it should've been approved, the only harm that should be considered is "was this money allocated to the research?"... not "was this researcher's career harmed?".
Right, exactly. And that seems to be exactly how the court ruled on this injunction. Since "just money" typically can't reach the bar of "irreparable harm", then an injunction that requires meeting the bar of "irreparable harm" is not granted.
The case itself still proceeds, there's just not an immediate injunction granted while the (slow as hell) court proceedings continue.
The court does not have before it the administration’s policy decision writ large. What it has before it are organizations representing groups of individuals who say their government grants were terminated. Whether or not you had a legal right to be paid money by the government is within the jurisdiction of the Court of Federal Claims. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Federal...
More generally, in American law, a claim for money is quintessentially something that cannot be the basis for “irreparable harm” to support a preliminary injunction. The law presumes that, where the claim is for money, the injury can virtually always be redressed by a payment of money once the case has been fully decided.
Except jobs can't be just reinstated when people are out of them so long that the knowledge moves elsewhere or experiments expire. Irreparable harm also includes things like injury to reputation, goodwill, professional practice.
The impending harm here is explicit, immediate, and as demonstrated previously serious for these labs and research fields. It's unfortunate that Judge Cobb didn't find this to be sufficient, but hopefully on appeals some relief may be offered.
Temporary loss of income is I think not generally a basis for irreparable harm for more or less the argument you hint at.
> Except jobs can't be just reinstated when people are out of them so long that the knowledge moves elsewhere or experiments expire.
Experiments expiring seems like a more compelling argument than knowledge moving elsewhere. The theory behind irreparable seems to be "it can't be fixed with money," not "you don't have enough money to fix it." If someone goes to a competitor then presumably there is an amount of money that would bring them back - it just might be out of your reach.
The problem with this approach is that so many Americans live paycheck to paycheck that job interruptions quickly become irreparable even with infinite money as the eventual solution.
It’s not that extreme for someone to go from job loss to losing most everything else over the course of 6 to 12 months because there’s little to no safety net.
It's a bit odd that we have such a huge personal injury lawsuit industry then? As "pain and suffering" or wrongful death cannot be fixed with money either.
I don't necessarily disagree with your logic, but that's not what the legal term is referring to. Too many people on HN think law is what they want it to be--not what it is. That term is generally reserved for things that are totally irreparable. Nothing you mentioned can't be made up for later.
It is 100% clear that, yes, there is harm being done. It's not at all clear that the harm is irreparable. They usually apply the term to things that are actually irreparable like the death penalty (can't resuscitate the dead person).
When entire labs are shut down, work halted, experiments frozen, people move on because they need to eat, this is absolutely going to cause irreparable harm to those specific people and programs, as well as science in the United States. (Edited to reflect that the harm is both specific and general)
My wife works in science and is seeing some of the effects of all this, and it's going to be a generational hit to research and development in this country.
If the Europeans were smart and faster moving they would have large scale programs to hire up people and move them over there, because there are tons of brilliant people doing important work that are being left high and dry.
> this is absolutely going to cause irreparable harm to science in the United States
Science isn't the plaintiff.
> If the Europeans were smart and faster moving they would have large scale programs to hire up people and move them over there, because there are tons of brilliant people doing important work that are being left high and dry.
Science often requires a lot of money, and generally Europe would rather wait for America to spend the money and make the discoveries while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
But scientists are and science is the industry that is being harmed.
> Europe would rather wait for America to spend the money and make the discoveries while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
And so now we’re not spending the money on discoveries and also cutting back on the social “niceties” we had spent whatever little amount of money on?
The US has been spending the most globally, in real terms per capita[0] and a percentage of GDP[1] on healthcare for a long time. How on earth can you justify the phrase "little amount of money"?
The problem wasn't the amount spent. The problem was the terrible hybrid of regulations that let the private sector down crazy rabbit-holes of false value to chase and be paid for, instead of just direct exposure to the real health market's needs.
Reading comprehension is important. Correct. The US as a country spends a lot more on health care than if there was a government-run single-payer system. I'm responding to this:
> while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
The US government doesn't pay for the "social nicety" of health care & in fact makes more money since that dues to private insurance industry generates even more tax revenue.
You can claim it's the regulations but all evidence I've read suggests it's the lack of single-payer system which removes the ability to negotiate + increases the complexity of the system because as a provider you have to pay more people to manage insurance payments with all the different providers vs 1 central provider.
> But scientists are and science is the industry that is being harmed
But the law doesn’t afford scientists any right to sue on the basis that they think the administration’s policy is bad for science writ large. That’s a policy determination outside the power of the courts to second guess. (Read *Marbury v. Madison and specifically the parts talking about ministerial actions. Courts can only enjoin executive officials to take ministerial actions the law clearly requires, not second guess the executive’s discretionary decisions.)
The actual legal rights the scientists can exercise are similar to those of any government contractor. If you have a contract to run a hotdog stand on a military base, the government has certain limitations on what it can and can’t do.
Europe spends more on academic research than the US, both in absolute terms and as a fraction of GDP. The US is ahead in business R&D.
But research funding is mostly used for hiring early-career researchers for fixed-term positions. If Europe wants to attract foreign academic talent, its universities need permanent increases in core funding for hiring additional faculty. And that's something European politicians largely don't support.
The rest of the world gets to benefit from the american brain drain, already in progress. The US is essentially going to turn into a similar shape as russia, a country with nukes but a shadow of its former prestige and soft power.
>Well, considering all other countries mentioned here are just hiring native people who worked in US. Indians are not hiring Chinese, or Europeans or any other than natively Indians. Same for Chinese or others. So nativist policy can for those countries but not US is strange.
Context is not neutral. "We want to hold onto the labor we produce" works for labor exporters in a way that it doesn't work for labor importers.
Mediocre by what metric? American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc. Of course there's always room for improvement.
> American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc.
I hate to break it to you, but a lot of our most valuable research is produced by people who did their primary education outside the US. Just go to a STEM research lab at any US university connected to a Nobel prize or Fields medal in the last 10-20 years, and it will be almost completely made up of internationally educated students / professors / etc.
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