Amid Cuts To Basic Research, New Zealand Scraps All Support For Social Sciences (science.org) 164
In an announcement that stunned New Zealand's research community, the country's center-right coalition government said it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund, the nation's sole funding source for fundamental science, to "research with economic benefits." From a report: Moreover, the fund would no longer support any social sciences and humanities research, and the expert panels considering these proposals would be disbanded.
Universities New Zealand, which represents the nation's eight universities, called the planned disinvestment in social science and humanities "astonishing." It was among several academic groups and many scientists calling for the government to reverse the unexpected decision.
In announcing the change, Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology Judith Collins said the fund should focus on "core science" that supports economic growth and "a science sector that drives high-tech, high-productivity, high-value businesses and jobs."
Universities New Zealand, which represents the nation's eight universities, called the planned disinvestment in social science and humanities "astonishing." It was among several academic groups and many scientists calling for the government to reverse the unexpected decision.
In announcing the change, Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology Judith Collins said the fund should focus on "core science" that supports economic growth and "a science sector that drives high-tech, high-productivity, high-value businesses and jobs."
Bad road to go down (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bad road to go down (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
A guess here is that baby boomer generation gave rise to lots of social science research areas and now that baby boomers are exiting the labor force in large numbers, they have a shrinking support pool of upper-echelon University administrators and servicing as elected officials for 30+ years politicians.
A second guess is that the universities are having a harder and harder time justifying low and declining enrollment degree plans, and the large expense in faculty/department heads for said degree plans.
http [rnz.co.nz]
A way forward (Score:3)
A path forward would be to require scientific methods in research such as a code of ethics for research to be published.
Exclude a few questionable research practices
- Self reported surveys, especially ones without any form of selecting a representative sample of respondents
- Research using only data from one demographic group and then portraying it as applying to everyone\
- Research based on a sample of social media messages
- Research based on continuum based questions reported as true/false by the research
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I've seen some of the Marsden proposals and holy shit do they fund a lot of pointless wank. I'm all in favour of basic research even if there's no immediately obvious application for it, but a lot of Marsden stuff seems to be based on there being no conceivable use for it at any point in the future, not just no immediately obvious application right now.
A side-note is that a good chunk of the current stuff is virtue-signalling based, where you'd better get some mention of indigenous people into it if you w
Re: Bad road to go down (Score:2)
I think something is getting lost in the /. Knee-jerk reactions - the role of the Marsden Fund was to fund "Blue Sky" projects, it is money specifically targeted at things that are 'way out there.'
The background appears to be that across the board, the NZ Gov't is cutting funding in basic research, and this move is reallocating money that would have been spent on "blue sky" projects and instead spending it on basic research.
The NZ Gov't is cutting RESEARCH funding for social sciences, not to INSTRUCTION of
Forget humanity, think critical thinking (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes you humanities work so well for teaching critical thinking is that there is value in being wrong. It's okay if you're reading of finnegans Wake isn't spot on. Whereas with a math equation you're either right or you're wrong. That leeway makes it possible for people who are not automatically prone to the critical thinking to learn the skills.
And make no mistake you want critical thinking taught because otherwise you're going to be surrounded by gormless rubes who will fall for every scam and they will take you down with them.
Honestly we're about to get a lesson in that over the next 4 years or so... There is already backpedaling going on around grocery prices and tariffs and other things and several million people are about to find out what concepts of a plan means for their pre-existing conditions... Even if you're smart enough to know about that doesn't do any good when 77 million people aren't. And that's why you want people to learn and be taught critical thinking
Re: (Score:2)
Right now we have solutions to most problems, but can't enact them due to politics and social issues. So I'd say understanding those things is of great importance.
Re: (Score:3)
" It's okay if you're reading of finnegans Wake isn't spot on."
Nobody's reading of Finnegans Wake is spot on. James was a right prick. In fact, I don't know who's the more robust prick - Pynchon or Joyce... Wake or Rainbow... hell either way.
So the way it's been explained to me (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah they actually do (Score:2)
So one of the reasons old farts like us don't like teachers is that we had a lot of bad teachers. The reason we had a lot of bad teachers was Vietnam. Every one of us had at least one usually two or three teachers who are in school for 6 or 7 years avoiding the Vietnam draft. When does teachers were done they had a mess of courses they had taken so they could st
Re: (Score:2)
Ha ha! Complete nonsense. You can't become a subject matter expert without critical thinking, but you can't think critically unless you are a subject matter expert?
Spoken like every academic who wanted to protect his postion in the food chain.
Logic is a branch of Mathematics. Logic is literally the main tool to be able to think criti
Re: (Score:2)
Subject matter expertise is, however, quite a difficult point. While I think most of us would agree that critical thinking is independent of subject matter expertise, it doesn't mean that I can blythely take my universally applicable critical thinking skills and confidently overrule the judgment of subject matter experts.
So if the dermatologist say the thing on Aunt Betty's arm is a harmless skin tag, and I, armed with Google and my critical thinking skills say its cancer, who should Aunt Betty believe? T
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You can't teach critical thinking with mathematics and science because basically everything you're going to do with those up through your undergraduate degree is just going to be memorizing things people have already discovered. In terms of hard science shit doesn't get interesting until your masters or your doctorate.
Utter bullshit. As someone with math education I can assure you that learning by "memorizing things" even in high school will lead you absolutely nowhere in mathematics. Also, mathematics and other STEM disciplines are extremely flexible in defining "truth". They do teach critical thinking. Oh boy, they do teach it, and whoever doesn't realize it after studying them, has wasted their time and effort.
Re: (Score:2)
You can't teach critical thinking with mathematics and science because basically everything you're going to do with those up through your undergraduate degree is just going to be memorizing things people have already discovered.
We remember maths class very differently. For me, most of it was trying to deduce some result from some form of original basic knowledge. First the basic operations, then mostly trying to demonstrate something. I'm sorry you had to just memorise things, it sounds like a terrible way to learn maths. I remember learning about things like square root, functions or logarithms as "the teacher gives us this new tool, then gives us problems that we didn't know how to tackle before, let's find ways to tackle them n
Re: (Score:2)
Based on what we see coming out of humanities degrees, it appears that what is taught is the opposite of critical thinking, but rather groupthink. The humanities' whole idea is to study the subjective, not the objective. Oh, maybe word frequency counts in Shakespeare might be an exception.
What the humanities' goal should be is to inculcate a knowledge of shared culture and history. It does not require humanities research, much less government support of that research, nor even the vast bulk of humanities
Re: (Score:2)
Critical thinking should be taught in high school, not after that. It is an essential life skill that everybody needs to learn.
Outside of a few red states (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep in mind again we're not dealing with something that is like science where you're either right or you're wrong up until graduate level. With the humanities things are fuzzy so some people are going to walk away without the critical thinking skills that the class was trying to teach.
It would also help if we could be more blunt in how we teach critical thinking but we have to pussy foot around religion. One of the things that makes a challenging to teach real and solid critical thinking skills to young kids is that those kids are going to use those critical thinking skills on their parents' religious texts. And religious texts are an absolute fucking mess cobbled together over thousands of years and they do not hold up well to serious critical scholarly analysis. I'm not talking about a 12-year-old learning ancient Hebrew or Hindi it's enough for them to just read a couple of books from actual scholars like Dan McClellan or Bart Erhman to cause all sorts of problems with the parents.
If you go to a very pricey private school you won't encounter any of this because the upper class doesn't buy into the same bullshit as the lower class. That's why if you go to Saudi Arabia you will find upper class women lounging around in bikinis but if a middle class or lower class woman tried to do the same she would be beaten to death.
Still to get back to the main point don't let perfect be the enemy of good. You want to teach as much critical thinking as you can around the people who don't want it taught.
Re: Outside of a few red states (Score:2)
They are all still teaching critical thinking.
Inference being that you live in a red state?
Re: (Score:3)
In reality, he is an Asian troll paid to destroy the USA.
By posting on Slashdot where only a few hundred people will ever read what he's saying at most? Your brain is retarded.
You see I'm actually the vice president of antifa (Score:2)
Actually what this particular troll is doing is mod bait. Slashdot has limited mod points and he's posting a bunch of troll comments in order to get moded down so that those mod points don't get applied to my post. It may even be a bot at this point.
Slashdot used to be a much bigger site so I think that we still get attention from the professional botnets. You could really see it during the election. I couldn't pos
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot used to be a much bigger site so I think that we still get attention from the professional botnets. You could really see it during the election. I couldn't post anything without it getting modded down to -1. It's always funny to see when one of them gets mod points because my last five posts get modded down by one point because they are pulling up my user ID so they can pull up my posts and modding them down one after another until they run out of mod points.
I don't know, you draw a lot of hate for some reason. People target you, remember the years of that twit doing variations of your user name?
Re: You see I'm actually the vice president of ant (Score:2)
It is funny that our now tiny little forum with a handful of old farts is still the focus of several large politically oriented botnets because 10 or 15 years ago we were a big deal. Remember when slashdotting was a thing? Or how about omg ponies? Those were the days
You're such a dumbass. You have no idea why "slashdotting" isn't a thing anymore. Back in those days, much of the internet was hosted on t-carrier pipes. A T-3 has 672 64kbit channels. Think about that. 1,000 users is easily enough to knock most of them over, something slashdot remains well capable of. But that's not how most hosting works anymore, now the internet is largely built around big CDNs that are geo-load balancing over multiple optical circuits. Even during its heyday, slashdot has no chance of k
Re: (Score:2)
They are all still teaching critical thinking. They're trying to in the red states but they're being interfered with and it's increasingly difficult.
Are you sure? I did a quick search to see what social sciences at Harvard [harvard.edu] are teaching. Vast majority of these are grievance studies [newdiscourses.com].
Re: (Score:3)
This black and white thinking is why people need to be taught critical thinking skills. But it's a very puritanical style which is why critical thinking is not taught.
The republican party has a much stronger record for much more widespread gerrymandering.
Re: (Score:2)
University is for profit. The objecti
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Bad road to go down (Score:2)
Social and economic science is fuzzy and as soon as a theory is released it's invariably going to be abused.
Re: (Score:2)
Humans will always remain humans....lack of study won't stop that. It's not like the the humanities studies teaches any of us to be nicer or treat each other better....it's really not all that useful for anything other than pure academia for the sake of academia.
Re: (Score:2)
But the whole chasing high tech, high productivity, high business stuff usually comes at a cost of our humanity.
Only for the poors. The rest will benefit immensely, they just won't have pretty pictures and fun stories.
Re: (Score:2)
The US and UK, for example, survived quite will for a long time without government support of humanities or social science research. Mainly, it's an innovation after WWII.
Re: (Score:2)
Science dollars shouldn't go toward fields which aren't actually applications of science and the scientific method
Your ignorance is showing ... again.
Re:Bad road to go down (Score:5, Funny)
Transsexuals haunt the GQP
Sen. Graham (R. of S. Carolina): We are here holding this hearing to hear evidence of transsexuals taking over America. Our witness is Dr. Hoo Me of NiH.
Sen. Blackburn (R. of Tenn.): Okay, Dr. Hoo, what can you tell us about the homosexuals taking over America?
Dr.. Hoo: Uh.I thought we were discussing transsexuals.
Sen. Blackburn: Aren’t all these sexuals the same?
Dr.. Hoo: No, not really. When one’s preferred gender does not match their biological “equipment”, we call them transsexuals.
Sen. Blackburn: Can’t they just look in their pants and figure it out?
Dr. Hoo (with a wry smile): Your brains are in your pants?
Sen. Blackburn: What?
Sen. Cruz (R. of Texas): I thought WE wanted to look in their pants?
Sen. Rick Scott (R. of Florida): I think we should get to look in their pants.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R. of Missouri): What is Sen. Blackburn trying to hide? We should check her pants.
Sen. Graham: Stop it, Stop it, STOP IT!! No one is looking in anyone’s pants.
Sen. Blackburn (very annoyed): Keep your eyes out of my pants, Sen. Hawley. Please answer the question Dr. Hoo.
Dr. Hoo (resuming his professional demeanor): I guess at a certain level of generality, all sexuals are the same. Take you for instance, I take it you are heterosexual, yes?
Sen. Blackburn: HOW DARE YOU? Accusing ME of being a heterosexuai!!!
Dr. Hoo (even more professionally): It simply means you are attracted to what you consider an opposite sex.
Sen. Blackburn: I’ll have you know I am happily married and have never been attracted to someone of an “opposite” sex!!.
Sen. Cornyn (R. of Texas): DamnI have been sitting next to her for years in this committee and had no idea. Dr. Hoo, can it rub off?
Dr. Hoo (realizing with whom he is dealing): Oh fer sure, fer sure!! You are probably a heterosexual now that you have spent so much time near Sen. Blackburn.
Sen. Cruz: Can it happen in other instances?
Dr. Hoo (smirking): Well, there is one other I know of, but it would be better if you didn’t know.
Sen. Cruz: I demand you tell us!!
Dr. Hoo: Well, if you insist. If you ever go to a men’s room and use a urinal with men at the urinals on either side of you, that can turn you into a transsexual.
Sen. Graham: Uh-oh.I stood between Sen. Cruz and Sen. Cornyn at the urinals this morningDr. do you think I have it?
Dr. Hoo (smiling viciously) : It is a distinct possibility.
Sen. Graham (now turning a delicate shade of green): Dr. Hoo, is there a cure?
Dr. Hoo (chuckling, but in a good-natured manner): There is only one cure. Stand in a barrel of eel eyes during a full moon at midnight. Sure fire way to cure you.
Sen. Blackburn (now achieving the Red Phase of Ticked Off): Sen. Cornyn, I did NOT make you a heterosexual. We are getting off topic. Dr. Hoo, does a woman have to worry about turning into, what did you call’em, a transsexual?
Dr. Hoo (now with big radiant smile): I’m glad you asked me that. There is one way I know of. Have you ever had sex with a man?
Sen. Blackburn: I’m married with children!
Dr. Hoo: Yes, but have you ever had sex with a man?
Sen. Blackburn: How else would I get them?
Dr. Hoo (Smiling with a more radiant smile is impossible, so he merely went with an ironic chuckle): In Vitro Fertilization. However, there is an effect of sexual intercourse with a male of which you are probably not aware.it can make a certain organ between your legs grow.unseemingly large.
Sen. Cruz: You know, you do walk funny, Sen. Blackburn.
Sen. Blackburn (now screeching): I do not!! My “organs” are normal!!
Sen. Cruz: That’s what you would say if you were lying.
Whereupon Sen. Blackburn, in the Incandescent Red Phase of being pissed off, hopped on the committee table, ripped off her skirt and panties and wowed the entire co
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This is sarcasm, right?
Possibly.
DOGE goes to New Zealand (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Much red tape.
Wow!
Very waste.
So money pit.
Hold my beer! (Score:2, Insightful)
Hold my beer!
-USA
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We don't have dollar bills, they are coins.
Which country are you in as there are certainly 1 dollar bills.
None of our bank notes have "in god we trust" on them.
on July 30, 1956, the President approved a Joint Resolution of the 84th Congress, declaring IN GOD WE TRUST the national motto of the United States. IN GOD WE TRUST was first used on paper money in 1957, when it appeared on the one-dollar silver certificate.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
- RossCWilliams post was a relevant comment about research funding.
- oumuamua's reply tried to make the subject about USA currency. I chose to call them out on that in the same way kind of indirect way he changed the subject.
- Then q_e_t tried to make it about USA currency, again. I called him out directly.
- Now you try to make it about the USA for a third time by anoth
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm in New Zealand, as per the post that this is about
Then saying "In NZ, ..." would have been clearer. There are a lot of people from the USA and since you mentioned "In God We Trust" then the reasonable assumption was you were talking about Yankee Dollars.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We don't have dollar bills, they are coins. None of our bank notes have "in god we trust" on them.
Now, now, this is an international site even if the Americans don't understand that.
They've every right to bitch about the poor design of their bank notes. Fun fact, every NZ bank note features a portrait of Russell Crowe.
Re: (Score:2)
> "There is but one God." ... and his name is Death. And what do we say to the God of Death? Take Sean Bean instead.
Re: (Score:3)
"There is but one God."
Allahu Akbar!
Or do you mean Linus? You need to be a bit more specific.
Re: (Score:2)
Conservative government... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, we have had a recent change in government, with the National Party taking the helm.
During their short term in office (2024), they have so far done the following:
* Cut government jobs significantly across many departments, including the healthcare services
* Cancelled the previous governments plans to replace the ailing ferries between the two main islands that make up NZ. The cancellation was done on "cost basis". Then they waited a year and announced they had a new plan which would see new ferries in use by 2029 - but they cant reveal costs because its "commercially sensitive".
* Scrapped the Maori Health Authority. This is important because Maori, while a minority here, are a large native minority that have their own health issues due to genetics and culture. The Maori Health Authority spends a lot of time and money working with the Maori Iwi (tribes) to get people to engage with healthcare providers early and often, which prevents extra spending later on in their life (eg diabetes and other issues are managed better earlier, which means better outcomes later in life and thus less care needed)
* Attempted to vastly reinterpret the Treaty of Waitangi, which lays out the rights of the Maori and other natives - unlike other situations, NZ essentially was never "conquered", but instead in the 1800s the local Maori came to an agreement with the British to share the lands of New Zealand. There have been ups and downs of this ever since, but its largely been a successful legal framework for cooperation. The current government is trying to gut it and hand all power to the government in terms of decisions and other things.
* Gutted tenants rights and reinstated landlord rights
And now they are gutting social and historical sciences...
Was it because of immigration? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here in America it's especially bad because we've got housing shortages but we keep bringing in more and more people on work visas. We also have a shortage of good middle-class jobs and again we bring in tons of people on work visas. Meanwhile we've managed to trick people into thinking the refugees who come here to pick fruit are the problem and not the highly educated people or the people here on advanced work visas doing the kind of construction work that would pay 60 or 70K a year...
Re:Was it because of immigration? (Score:5, Interesting)
Immigration is what NZ runs on, from the lowest class of worker (seasonal produce pickers) right through to the top earning IT jobs - and the problem isnt that immigration here is forcing Kiwis out, its that a good proportion of Kiwis move into practical jobs rather than intellectual jobs. They want to be dairy farm hands, or conservationists, or work with animals, or labourers.
I work in IT in Auckland (been here 7 years now so I'm an immigrant myself), and I work with several government agencies - probably 90% of workers I have interacted with are immigrants. I've hired workers into positions here, and theres no Kiwi applicants. You have to hire immigrants most of the time if you want to find someone to fill the positions.
Truancy rates in schools here hover around 50% - thats quite frankly fucking insane. Kids arent interested in getting a decent education, and parents arent interested in their kids getting a decent education, so its down to immigrants to actually form the backbone of anything approaching a decent economy here long term.
If your truancy rates really are 50% (Score:3)
I will say this, there are a ton of educational opportunities for immigrants here in America that just are not available to Americans. I think the reason is our upper class d
Re:If your truancy rates really are 50% (Score:5, Interesting)
Never said anything about the kids being lazy...
Its just that a lot of them want to be outside and doing things there rather than in the classroom or in an office - its *extremely* common here to see Kiwi kids wearing no shoes for example, and thats not because they cant afford them, its just because they dont wear them. And they will go walking, playing, biking etc like that in all weathers - if there were ever snow on the ground here, they still wouldnt wear shoes.
The guy who cuts our lawn every 2 weeks is a 14 year old kid - he goes to school, but he hates it and prefers to do other things. His school had a scheme which encouraged students to set up businesses, and he chose a garden maintenance business - and he actually took it out of school and into the real world.
He spends all his weekend cutting lawns, from 8am to late at night Saturday and Sunday (and when the weathers shit, he does it during the week after school) - hes self motivated, has his own equipment, wears all the right protective gear and walks everywhere (because he isn't old enough to not).
And thats a fairly typical Kiwi kid.
NZ is still an extremely practical economy - the adverts on the radio here (I dont have broadcast TV so no idea if its the same there) aren't for luxury goods, they are for sheds and barns and farming machinery and septic tanks and such. If there are road works, you dont get automated lights controlling traffic, its all men with flags (and at the end of the day the work is tidied away enough to open the road again without directional restrictions). You dont buy fence panels, you hire someone to build you a fence.
Farming supply stores are as prominent in towns as supermarkets.
The vast majority of the time you are dealing with small companies because people like working for themselves.
And so on. The people are going into work, they are just going into low income work because thats the work they like doing. So if NZ wants an IT economy, it has to come from somewhere else - immigration.
Re: (Score:2)
While I haven't been to New Zealand yet, I do know a lot of Kiwi diaspora. There has been a significant brain-drain of young Kiwis finishing university heading to Australia, UK, and the US for better jobs for a long time. It seems like only ~10% ever move back.
Re: (Score:2)
Truancy rates in schools here hover around 50% -
Attendance rate is 85%. That's not good, but the rate of 50% means that half of kids have in the course of a year skipped one or more classes and is much less dramatic. It's a bit worse than the USA (90% attendance rate) but not drastically so. It should be 100%, though. UK is at 93%. I couldn't find a stat for France or Finland, although about 3% in Finland basically never turn up, 5% in Germany.
Re: (Score:2)
The stats Im going by are from the Government, and are based on a 90% or higher attendance rate for a term.
In other words, it’s significantly more than just skipping one class, its skipping 10% or more classes in a term.
https://www.educationcounts.go... [educationcounts.govt.nz]
Re:Was it because of immigration? (Score:5, Interesting)
I would have loved to see Biden fly to the border in an Apache helicopter, stand on top of a tank with some binoculars, looking very serious. Talk about how terrible the Mexican, emphasis on Mexican, fentanyl is. Maybe blow some money to have the Army stationed there doing nothing, like Greg Abbott did with the Texas National Guard.
The voters who care about this stuff don't need to see results, they just need to be bombarded with the noise.
Instead Biden did stuff like keeping Trump's "covid restrictions" at the border in place - I guess he thought that was some kind of compromise? - and didn't ever talk about it, not once.
Realistically I think there's no avoiding most nations developing borders that look like the Iron Curtain, or the North Korean DMZ. Climate change is going to create a volume of refugees that we can't even comprehend today. The last-century idea that refugees are an aberration, consisting of people who can be easily and temporarily accommodated until the war in their home country is over, is what the current systems were designed to address. But that is not the type of problem we will be having going forward.
The other idea about migration, that it's necessary to populate a country or bring in workers, is also last-century. We are overpopulated. We have masses of unemployed people who would take those "unwanted" jobs if there were a modest pay bump and a risk-free path to train and onboard to those jobs. We also have masses of employed people in bullshit jobs like health insurance who should be reallocated to useful tasks like construction and agriculture.
The liberal radio shows I listen to love to talk about "We need them" (immigrants) and that line is a stinker. If they dropped that, it might be the only thing needed to prevent a fascist takeover. And if, on top of that, Democrats also addressed people's real problems - healthcare, housing, education - guys like Trump would get laughed out of the room and never make it out of reality TV.
Re: (Score:2)
Seems like everywhere I look right wing authoritarians
I wonder why there are right wing authoritarians. Why do they feel the need to hurt others? Or is it some other motivation? Oh well, New Zealand will never find out now with this move.
Re: (Score:2)
* Removed BEV rebates.
* Added RUC charges to BEVs.
Re: (Score:2)
Raised ACC taxes for the next three years by 5% plus inflation each year.
After slashing taxes earlier in the year for their cronies.
Re: (Score:3)
That's conservatives/right oriented politics for you.
They might as well introduce "poor houses" again, like in Dickens' England.
Re: (Score:2)
typically shortsighted (Score:5, Interesting)
Back when I was a young undergraduate student in STEM, we were required to take numerous humanities courses as part of our degree requirements. Many of my classmates didn't take it seriously. I heard them say things like "I'm never going to need this for my job." And at the time, I also remember agreeing with that sentiment. It didn't make sense to me that I was being forced to spend time learning about things that weren't relevant to my degree.
Years later, I began to understand and appreciate why those requirements existed and the value they provided. Science is great. It is the single most useful and powerful framework with which humanity is able to understand the universe we live in. It makes technological advancement possible.
But ask yourself, what is the purpose of (to paraphrase Jean-Luc Picard) "this creation of our genius?" Is it simply for the financial benefit of their discoverers and corporate backers? The pursuit of science and technology is one that must always be firmly rooted in the service of humanity; its existence should aim to enrich our lives--not to enslave, oppress, or destroy.
And we risk losing sight of this goal if we do not teach the humanities. The social sciences and the humanities provides us with the broader ethical and moral context for the advancement of science. It teaches and reminds us that we are each here, in our limited lifetime, to make the world a better place for each other. Science without humanities is what leads to the implementation of technologies that serve the few at the expense of the many--an amoral approach that is too often used to justify exploitation.
Re: (Score:3)
I agree - took a philosophy of logic course which was great. Basically a course on how to make a point, convince people, and spot when you are being manipulated. If everyone had such skills then Democracy would be far more effective.
But I will note that removing funding from research in humanities does not imply it will no longer be taught. It implies that you will not get a government grant if pursuing your PhD. You will have to find your own sources of funding. I could see many of the most talente
Re: typically shortsighted (Score:2)
Yeah... I think some of the "research" in the humanities gets a little ridiculous. It'd be healthier IMO to just accept that in some fields most academics will not be writing papers routinely but instead will focus on being educators. And the funding for "research" can just go as a basic subsidy to education so the populace at large is more likely to learn the fundamentals.
When you give a grant to study "gamer culture" or some such you're really just paying to subsidize someone's phd. There isn't a shortage
Report is not very accurate! (Score:3, Informative)
The redirection of Marsden Fund money is a fact. But many other funding sources, both government and non-governent,still exist.
For example: - $315 million of research every year through the PBRF
- The Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment lists 19 other funds available for research
- Ministry for Social Development has funding available for social science research
- The Health Research Council has funding available for health research.
There are plenty of other governrment, business and privately backed funds.
The reigning in of the Marsden Fund, to focus on its original mission, trims only a small amount of funding from increasingly vacuous research areas.
The "Science" minister (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously, you don't expect a politician to have an understanding of the sciences do you? Most of them can barely tie their own shoelaces.
Re: (Score:3)
Hydrogen as an alternative to other flammables has the problem that it's flammable. I would expect anyone raised in a semi-modern country to have a good enough grasp of sciences to understand that that statement is. . . I can't think of a polite way to say it. It's stupid. Ignorant. Dumb. And several other not acceptable words.
Short sighted and fearful people do this (Score:5, Insightful)
People with right-wing tendencies seem to be driven by fear and selfishness, unable to understand the benefit of community and investing in the community as a whole.
If it's not in their immediate self-interest, it must be a waste of time, money and a bad thing. If it's not something they care about, it must be a waste of time, money, and a bad thing. So ban research. Ban education. Eventually you ban those uppity women who talk back to you when you tell 'em to get back in the kitchen. Easy solution to all problems - ignore the details and just MAKE people do what you think they should.
A generation later they won't understand why things are worse (but I guarantee they'll have a scapegoat instead of taking responsibility), and that next generation won't understand either, because the tools of understanding are being removed from them.
This is a human thing, and if I had a better education in the social sciences myself, maybe I'd understand how we tend over time to overcome it and improve our average standard of living anyway.
Re: (Score:3)
maybe I'd understand how we tend over time to overcome it and improve our average standard of living anyway.
That's a pretty easy one: Eventually the blowhards either create a hellhole so bad that they get overthrown by those they consider under them, or they piss off a neighboring state so bad that they barge in and remove them by force.
There's typically a few among the downtrodden who manage to keep around the tools of understanding, develop new methods and technologies, and may even use them to help bring about said outcomes, despite the blowhard's efforts to eradicate them. Even when the blowhard is success
The point of research is that you're not sure (Score:5, Insightful)
If we knew that a certain line of research definitely or at least very likely will pay off, it's no longer research but pure development. The point of research is to investigate ideas that are uncertain. So, if the research fund is only allowed to fund projects with obvious economic benefits, then it will be useless as research funding.
If the idea is to only fund electronics and physical sciences, then there are plenty of such research project that will never yield direct economic benefits. And the other types of research do sometimes impact the economy, but in ways that are not direct and obvious.
Meh. I get the point. (Score:2)
Social sciences were always problematic, suffering from poor research/testing methodologies, reproducibility problems, practical applications - pretty much anything we would consider of value.
Psychology itself is a quagmire of overlapping psychosis that grows in leaps and bounds every year - I suspect this trajectory will eventually reach the natural conclusion that all of us are mentally impaired to a greater or lesser degree - and that would be the most factual conclusion yet achieved in the field.
This
The real productivity booster (Score:2)
Psychological safety is the one factor that consistently and probably improves employee productivity. See Google research from ~2012. And that is exactly what social sciences deals with.
Sorry about your stupid government, Kiwis! We still love you!
Re: (Score:2)
Psychological safety is the one factor that consistently and probably improves employee productivity.
It's manufactured garbage. Safe-spaces talk for childish minds. It's a tool for the undeveloped/malformed mind to practice passive agressive behaviours in the workplace.
Dealing with challenging ideas, situations and people is what being human is all about. Demanding special treatment because your parents/siblings/family/friends failed to equip you with the necessary tools is factually childish and worthy of every ounce of derision it receives. Be a better human.
Social sciences and humanities (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
On Whale Carcasses: Parasites and the Rot of Our Institutions [jordanbpeterson.com]
Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America [amazon.com]
Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America [jhu.edu]
Communism! (Score:3)
In Greece, sociology and two more social science classes have been cancelled in schools since 2020, because, as a minister of the far-right government said in TV, "sociology turns our kids to communists!"
Sociology has been replaced by... Latin!
Of course, the religious indoctrination lesson is still mandatory for 2 hours every week for seven out of twelve grades.
Conservatives are ontologically evil, part million (Score:2)
Dunno what else to say really.
Economic benifits? (Score:2)
Research with economic benefits? (Score:2)
No problem: tax all incomes over $5M/yr at 95%. Instant tax sunshine.
Good (Score:2)
Slapping the word "science" on something does NOT make it SCIENCE.
Science uses the scientific method. Science is objective. Science does not care about your feelings; it's stuff like Chemistry and Physics - the hard courses students fear most in college.
Far too many fluffy, subjective, vacuous, phonybaloney, hippie chick "courses" have over the past 40 years or so gotten away with naming themselves "studies" or "science" to try to attain an air of legitimacy, and sadly too many serious scholars have tolera
Re:Social sciences (Score:5, Insightful)
You really have no idea what you're talking about.
Re:Social sciences (Score:4, Informative)
So much wrong in so little time. Some minds are just.... less than healthy.
Social sciences
Anthropology
Economics
Political science
Psychology
Sociology
Show me on this rotten leg of cow where the nasty DEIB touched you?
Re: (Score:2)
Criminology and geography too.
Sociology has been in something of an upheaval; ironically though conservatives have embraced the strong programme of sociology of science because they reject what they see as the privileged position of scientific consensus.
Re: (Score:2)
The REAL benefit is exposure to other perspectives which is where a lot if not most innovation comes from. People so drastically different are rare and may find a place for themselves and teach some class like that in the future. Real diversity is in the MIND not the appearance; but stupid has been infecting colleges too... You ruffians need more interaction as does the self-defensive snob who must insulate himself in a sea of ruffians.
Surviving the gauntlet that used to be higher ed, was a filter and indi