Science is partisan, at least the 'science' being addressed in this article, because the funding for this science comes from a finite source and there are competing demands placed on this finite source. As any competent scientist knows, taking something from a finite source leaves less in the source. There are differing ideas and beliefs, some partisan (including those of the esteemed Mr. Colbert), on how best to divide up this finite source.

Science being partisan right now has nothing to do with funding. It has to do with the disdain that the people currently in power have to live in a shared reality with the rest of the poulation.

Theres a monumental leap from saying "lets not invest in climate change because thats not a good use of tax dollars" to "lets not invest in climate change because its a hoax."

Any “investment” here directly translates to more human activity that will make climate change worse not better. It is hypocritical to have these climate conferences and fly there burning jet fuel. The need of the hour is to drastically reduce the GDP - we need to rewind the clock 50years. But this will never happen because folks will lose jobs and scientists will lose their funding.

Definitely. We should ignore it and it'll go away by not going into these damn climate conferences. There are so many of them!

Science is becoming partisan not just because of funding, but because too many people have stopped trying to persuade the people who need persuading. Instead we get statements like, "It has to do with the disdain that the people currently in power have to live in a shared reality with the rest of the population."

If your starting talking point is that half the country is irrational or detached from reality you've already abandoned the work of building consensus. We can keep doing the "Jon Stewart" thing and scoring points by calling the other side idiots, or we can grow up, act like adults, and do the much harder work of convincing people.

I never said half the country is irrational. I specifically called out that people in power do not care to live in a shared reality with the rest of us. They lie directly [1][2], or dismantle the institutions that would be able to push back on their lies [2][3]. Countless examples of this in the last few years.

I do think a non-trivial portion of the population has opinions that have unfortunately diverged from what a board of climate scientists or epidemiologist would say is the appropriate state of affairs, and yes this is a problem we all need to figure out how to correct.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/06/california-s... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj0z9nmzvdlo [3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg3xrrzdr0o [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/climate/ocean-observatori...

> If your starting talking point is that half the country is irrational or detached from reality you've already abandoned the work of building consensus. We can keep doing the "Jon Stewart" thing and scoring points by calling the other side idiots, or we can grow up, act like adults, and do the much harder work of convincing people.

THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SCIENCE.

The science is doing research and writing reports about what they've found. Which is getting defunded and denied and destroyed.

Is it now partisan to say "I'm in favor of doing research into how earth's climate is changing and what if anything is causing it"??

You are 100% correct. The (horrible) abandoning of funding for these needed science projects is not science, but politics. My entire point. We need to try and bring these people back to reality not using science but persuasion/being politically intelligent in our speech with them, not dumb destructive (but feels good for a minute) Jon Stewart style belittling.

Do you honestly believe the Trump administration will set aside their anti-vaccine vengeance tour and anti-woke activism because someone talks to them persuasively??

You can't use logic to get someone out of a position they didn't logic themselves into.

Exactly. One side prefers being miserly on science while spending lavishly on needless wars.

In normal times, what you say is obviously true.

But specifically at this moment in time what you've written is total hogwash. Currently the US is spending money as if it's, specifically, an infinite resource.

Hence, this kaibosh on science funding can only be explained because the powers that be want it dead and gone.

Do with that info what you will. The various flavours of conspiracy-theory-leaning ideas on wanting to 'scare the scientist community away from commenting on political affairs' seem like the most likely explanation to me despite how petty and crazy that sounds.

If you are a scientist, get out.

Either out of science, or away from US-centric research systems.

Currently, in the US, money is an infinite resource. One need only look at the world's latest one point five trillionaire.

Where is the money coming from to support that valuation? And why is it being spent to maintain that valuation? Part of it is accounting tricks (sell 5% of a company for $20, and you're worth $400 with only $20 changing hands) but there's also genuinely a massive unexplained amount of money in existence in the US financial system, that should have caused massive inflation by now but somehow hasn't. Maybe it's only a matter of time, or maybe due to class segregation, it's stable like this and will never come down the ladder to affect grocery prices?

> Currently, in the US, money is an infinite resource. […]

Try harder to engage in dialog. Basic economic theory contradicts your claim. You need a much stronger logical argument to have any credibility.

No, no, they're definitely correct. There's no hard limit on the amount of money created. Excess money creation just results in inflation.

More to the point: Congress is being profligate in other spending, and miserly w.r.t. science, so it does indeed look like the science cuts are not motivated by fiscal responsibility.

Your quip about "basic economic theory" doesn't really address the point they're making.

Um, "basic economic theory" would include the processes that create money and the limits on them, which can be disabled, and what happens if the limits are disabled

the US can trivially and renewably acquire infinite money (in USD). It is an infinite resource.

Wealth on the other hand....

Valuations are often an absurd fantasy. The notion is that Musk could find a buyer who would be willing to pay that based on the value of each share he owns. It’s not real money. He can borrow against it but not too much, and he will have to find a way of paying the lender back without selling stock. The money is not real.

If he dumped all of his shares the value of them would essentially go away, like with any commodity.

He gets to exercise power based on his valuation, and in that sense, it is real. He is now known as the world's richest person and first one point five trillionaire, even if he doesn't have one point five trillion dollar bills in his closet. He gets people to suck up to him for fractions of it - "do X for me and I'll give you shares worth a million"

> there are competing demands placed on this finite source

The US national debt has gone up by 2 trillion under the current administration. They are spending money they don't have at a faster rate than any time in history.

Whatever else you can say about the cuts to science, you can't say they're due to "competing demands." They're not cutting in order to fund better research, they're cutting (in the most counterproductive way) to send a message to scientists that politically inconvenient research is not welcome.

Trump's 17 months in office saw $17T increase in debt, 30% of the entire US debt, representing about 220 years of what the US had spent prior to ever electing him.

Both sides have biases against parts of science:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rBNtOCCSSRc

I don't think I've ever met a leftist denying evolution.

Me neither. Lots of them deny that certain differences between humanity exist however, and that's just biology.

Eg. Fe-/male and racial differences. They exist, yet they cannot be admitted to and any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot, because the other terms are already less impactful from overuse

It’s one of those topics where there’s a kernel of truth, but most people who insist women or Black people are scientifically different are not doing so out of any interest in science. So the small percentage of people who just want to make a valid point get lumped in with the much larger group, and unfairly tarred.

Perhaps because, to many people, it seems wrong to set policy based on marginal differences in the aggregate when the policy will affect individuals, and also because people doubt the motives of those who are highly invested in proving a scientific basis for negative stereotypes.

I wonder who makes assumptions that these differences are marginal and refuse or deny any studies that conclude otherwise. The left version of climate change if you will.

You make a good point in that there are large, slow-moving, but statistically significant effects in climate change, gender, and race.

You out yourself pretty badly in implying that individuals can be ignored in gender and race in the name of aggregate statistics.

There is similarity, there is not sameness, and like I said… the people who are fascinated with proving statistical differences in gender and race usually have ulterior motives. Just like climate deniers.

> any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot

I think this boils down to the fact it's typically just a thin veil for motivated reasoning.

What's the veiled motivation of a white person who says that Asians are intellectually superior to whites?

Leftists see racism and sexism everywhere - their ideology focusses on that and they pick up on any excuse they can to label people as that. It's actually a horrible way to treat their fellow humans.

Because the same reasoning behind that statements implies that certain races are innately inferior to others. You chose to write "Asians" and "whites" here - why not make the same statement with "whites" and "blacks?"

Saying "Asians" are intellectually superior to "whites" is a thinly veiled way to say "and whites are superior to all other non-Asian/white races."

And the claim that "Asians" are intellectually superior to "whites" isn't even correct "because of race." I'm not aware of any real study that attributed racial identity to measure intelligence. Cultural differences? Socioeconomic differences? Country of origin? Sure. Race? Used as a proxy for the former.

Racial identity is a good proxy for ethnicity which studies do show affects IQ.

And that's the most anti-scientific attitude a person can possibly have, what you just said.

> Eg. Fe-/male and racial differences. They exist, yet they cannot be admitted to and any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot, because the other terms are already less impactful from overuse

This is a pretty weird take. I'm a liberal with a lot of liberal, progressive, and even socialist friends, and basically nobody has a problem with recognizing the statistical differences between men and women.

There's plenty of discussion about how much of those differences are innate biology vs environment, though. And there's discussion about how much overlap there is between men and women - often, there's a lot of overlap, which makes stereotypes not so useful. But the existence of differences? Oh, sure, yes, of course there are differences.

So I'm not sure if you're suggesting something you're not saying ("racial differences in intelligence are innate, not environmental"), or if one of us is out of touch with what 'leftists' think.

ETA: I say "one of us" because ofc I may also be wrong! Most of my friends are well-educated, and both that and selection bias may skew my experiences away from normal

Totally, but there’s a lot more to science than just evolution.

Sure, but that's one of examples OP gave and it doesn't match my experience. Doesn't leave a great impression of the rest of the argument.

For the record, I provided a counterargument and it got flagged and downvoted.

It's quite common for people on the left to categorically deny that evolution could explain any cognitive group differences between human populations.

I think it’s less that it’s impossible but more that we don’t have any clue as to what causes differences among groups and many people use such measured differences as evidence for pretty deplorable ideas. There’s much more evidence for social determiners than anything biological. Everyone outside of Africa shares a single ancestor 20,000 years ago. There’s far more genetic diversity within Africa than the rest of the world. That alone is often enough to disprove many theories regarding racial differences since our intuitive understanding of “genetic difference” is so flawed.

Past research has a eugenicist bias because early statisticians were eugenicists seeking evidence for the ideas. I would argue that’s why the social determiners research is valuable to help offset that.

It's closer to 70,000 years. If not, then explain the Australian Aborigines.

Oh good point, sorry got the years mixed up in my head somehow.

> I think it’s less that it’s impossible but more that we don’t have any clue as to what causes differences among groups

I think we have a lot of clues, but scientists who dare say so get heavily censored by largely left-wing media and academics. Even in this forum my comment above got heavily downvoted and flagged.

> Past research has a eugenicist bias because early statisticians were eugenicists seeking evidence for the ideas. I would argue that’s why the social determiners research is valuable to help offset that.

Current bias goes clearly far in the opposite direction, which is bad. There is no "offsetting" with the past which would make an existing bias less bad.

It’s not suppressed though, it’s just that the current evidence points in one way and much less in the other. There are plenty of review papers you can read to see how people weigh the evidence which you can of course disagree with: https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(95)00678-r

https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026699

https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000131

Because if you give an inch to that line of thinking, it leads to broader dehumanization and mass tragedy.

No matter how noble your intentions are, if you reject science then you're anti-science. Leftists need to learn to admit that about themselves instead of trying to have their cake and eat it too.

What is true is already so.

Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.

Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.

And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.

Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.

People can stand what is true,

for they are already enduring it.

(Eugene T. Gendlin)

This is a good point.

There are times where lefties will deny science in an effort to avoid mass atrocities, which I think is a fraught situation.

Inversely, righties tend to deny science in order to justify mass atrocities (like industrial-scale animal suffering or cataclysmic extinction events).

These are basically the same thing! /s

Certainly most universities now have a very strong liberal bias. I think most science departments were left leaning in the 1950s, but it is stronger now. (I think colleges and universities have always been more progressive than the general populous.) The administrations of universities are now very strongly Democrat leaning. I think that Trump just sees a lot of Democrat run institutions and thinks, "Why should the government support these institutions run almost entirely by Democrats."

Because until this administration, it has been considered a vital principle of democracy that the elected government supports all the citizens and institutions of the nation, not just the ones that it controls.

But principles don't exist out of nowhere. We had a very partisan country in the past. Consensus was built to get us here, then we just stopped putting in work on building/keeping consensus and resorted to Jon Stewart style calling/making people look like idiots, and expecting past consensus to hold things together in a Jon Stewart style world of mockery of each other. Consensus requires respect each way. One side threw it out the door (knowing or not) with Jon Stewart style ridicule of other but is shocked when that then got responded to X100 with Trump style politics.

This is has been significantly overstated my entire life - people making this claim always point to the women’s studies faculty and don’t mention how many engineering, Econ, law, etc. faculty are more conservative — but it more deeply misses the cause, as well. As the Republican Party purged internal dissent, that pushed people out who might have otherwise been on board for things like their fiscal or foreign policy positions but weren’t willing to say gay people were less than fully human or rejected the war on science. That last one is huge for universities because for most of the current century being a Republican has required rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change, the most pressing issue of our time, as well as other topics like public health or the separation of church and state. Criticizing universities for not having more people who reject their foundational principles is badly missing the point.

I used to know a Republican lobbyist who worked on environmental issues. He used to represent the coalition of fishers, hunters, hikers, bird-watchers, etc. who valued healthy forests, water, etc. but that line of work disappeared when they put out the fatwa against giving Obama any legislative wins even on issues which have broad public support and it never really came back because the party leadership decide that they represented industry first and only. Those people didn’t suddenly become liberals, the party moved away from them.

Exactly man exactly, most every professor in the United States hates Donald Trump. 80, 90, 95%+ of professors at about say, 90% of all universities hates Donald Trump and the Republican party and will gladly tell you they do. The thing is, this isn't a new thing, they also hated the last R guy, and the R guy before him, and so on and so forth. What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him? To be fair, that's what he usually does though, so I can understand being blindsided by this.

> What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him?

So you believe it's expected that a president will de-fund everything that supports their opposing party? I'm sure that's a totally great idea that won't cause any issues whatsoever.

American politics are so absurd.

Honestly, yes. I would expect that, or at least whichever party controls Congress to defund efforts that would seek to hurt them. The real abberation is that university funding has gone unscathed for so long. It's said too much and honestly I hate it, but consider the hypothetical: what if 80% of professors expounded right wing ideologies for about, 60 years? Would you not expect some kind of backlash?

I’m sure the same justification was trotted out in Hungary when they purged the intellectuals there, too.

Eh, I think there's a bit of a logical jump between "professors hate Trump" and "professors are expounding left-wing ideologies".

Yes, most professors are opposed to Trump. But when you're talking to a professor of, say, metallurgy, he's not using his classroom to rant against Trump. He's using his classroom to teach students about metallurgy, which is a pretty dang useful service to a modern industrial economy. Professor's personal political views aren't interfering with the economic and scientific value he's providing to the country.

Which is why the universities and research centers have largely been untouched until now. Until Trump, both sides could recognize that even if there was political disagreement between the professors and the politicians, the professors were still doing important work.

Trump took it personally, and on that personal basis he's now eroding our scientific and technological future. We're eating our seed corn, here.

> What did they expect would happen? Trump to just continue funding these people that hate him?

Never before in my recollection has U.S. national science policy been tied so closely tied to personal fealty to the president. It is alarming that you see nothing wrong with the connecting science funding to political alignment. This is highly aberrant.

In any case, if a majority of academics despise Trump and lean leftward overall, then maybe it would be a moment for self-identifying Republicans to gaze into the mirror and see what might be the reasons for this. As an academic, I have a commitment to the truth. This administration has no such commitment. This has been thoroughly documented.

> In any case, if a majority of academics despise Trump and lean leftward overall, then maybe it would be a moment for self-identifying Republicans to gaze into the mirror and see what might be the reasons for this

Yeah the reason for this is that conservatives have been unjustly excluded from academia for almost a century.

Please don't do this* here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48568492.

* by "this" I mean posting ideological clichés and internet tropes - This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

It’s true in the sense that scientific exploration expands our understanding of the world, which often forces us to re-evaluate our beliefs and adopt new ones, something that is antithetical to small C conservatism, almost by definition. So in that sense, reality does have a “liberal” (perhaps more accurately progressive) bias, the more we learn about it.

There is also quite a lot of history through the ages of science being a partisan issue as new discoveries upended the stories told by the established powers.

So I stand by my comment and it would apply to any political era.

There’s a reason Colbert’s joke works: it’s true.

Ok, but that doesn't make the GP a good Hacker News comment. It simply repeats a cliché, and a good HN comment should be more substantive than that.