This is a regularly done conservative tactic. Attack research because it’s frequently stupid sounding. But sometimes stupid sounding research leads to incredible things.
Sometimes you research the mating habits of red eyed tree frogs and you learn a lot for conservation efforts and stuff about the species. Conservatives love this because they can hand wave and go “who cares about this thing I personally don’t care about”
But those science nerds sometimes do stuff like researching gila venom in the 70s which eventually led to ozempic now, one of the potential major treatments for t2 diabetes, a scourge of our morbidly obese modern society. This has gigantic positive implications for public health and financial benefits
The whole point is you can’t know until you’re done what will be groundbreaking
It’s an even more fundamental conservative tactic. What they do is find a single example of something they think they can easily deride and hold it up as representative of that entire thing. Think welfare, immigration, criminal justice, reproductive rights, gender identity, and much more. Right wing media is full of single cases they beat into their viewerships’ minds while ignoring all other cases
Well, that was something that benefitted women, so it’s clearly not efficient for any of the grey, white men in this committee
including trans women, which they also hate
That’s not true. The rethoric is easily explained. They’re not women if you can’t “grab them by the pussy”
Sunfish I can’t find the actual study, it appears it was done in 1975, and was a big thing that congress at the time used as the examples of wasteful spending.
First 2 I can’t really say the value or lack of value of. I mean they were studies on effects of dangerous substances on behavior. and yes of course like all studies you pick animals that you might be able to get the effects of. Obviously a lot of science is just randomly probing around looking for oddities that give you a hypothesis to try and refine later into something useful. Obviously addictive substances is an important topic to understand, and poking around randomly might actually give solutions that could be discovered IMO.
Now the last one is the only one I’d agree, isn’t exactly super useful.
was done in 2016.
All that being said… lets also take a serious statement on cost here… a million dollars in 2016. That’s like, 15 minutes of iraq war money.
How much do we pay for politicians and their security to go golfing?
This isn’t about efficiency, it’s about attacking science as a tool for evaluating truth. It’s a way to discredit the authority of expertise and shape the course of research with selective funding and demonization.
I think it’s because Elon Musk just really wanted to be the head of a department called “D.O.G.E.”. The whole attacking science thing is just a bonus.
I never knew pregnancy tests had frogs in them. The sticks seem so small.
the american people are not intellectual, to put it mildly
Death to America
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/06/21/533840751/episode-779-shrimp-fight-club
It’s a great listen and conservatives as usual can’t stop being fucking retards.
Wait, but which is it? Tequila or Gin? I need THE SCIENCE!!
Studying fly development has led to cancer treatments targeting the sonic hedgehog pathway.
Science inherently involves the reproduction of work that’s already been done. That’s how the process ensures reproducibility. Talking about the efficiency of science makes very little sense because the savings bought by science are privatized, viewed like externalities.
Here’s the tweet in question: https://xcancel.com/DOGE/status/1858540521096089876#m
Anyone know what studies it’s referring to?
