Tens of thousands of papers have made important scientific advances using it successfully and CRISPR-Cas methods are used routinely throughout almost all of biology.

This is like calling PCR "overhyped" because PCR-based infectious disease diagnostics are limited.

Science is actually progressing at an amazing rate in recent years. We are curing diseases and understanding more about life and the universe faster than ever.

Just briefly skim some top journals right now:

Here's an amazing 'universal vaccine' for respiratory viruses in mice https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea1260

here are brand new genome editors in human cells https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz1884

Here's amazing evidence of an ancient lake on Mars https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu8264

Here's a meta-analysis of 62 (!) different studies on GLP1 receptor agonists to figure out whether they can contribute to pancreatitis https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/edm2.70113

(covered here https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00552-6)

Here's identification of a new mechanism of resistance in Malaria https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10110-9

Here's curing a genetic disorder using gene editing in mice https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10113-6

Here's a study that has figured out that as CO2 levels rise, there's less nitrogen in forests https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10039-5

and here's personalized mRNA vaccines curing people of breast cancer https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10004-2

Like all of these are just from the past month or two and are pretty astounding advances. And they are just a subset of all of the scientific advances recently. All of them have contributors in academia (and science performed outside of academia would not exist without academia, as it depends upon it for most of the conceptual advances as well of course as for scientist training).

1. Stuff like paper mills and complete fraudsters exist, but for the most part, these things are the exception, not the rule. Your average scientist doesn't even hear or think about these things and the weirdos who cause them, to be honest. Nobody has ever heard of "International Review of Financial Analysis" outside of an extremely niche economics subfield.

2. "Public or perish" is not a cycle, really. While I believe it's not good for people to be constantly working under pressure, the fact that academia is so competitive currently is a healthy sign. It's because we have so many people with extremely impressive resumes and backgrounds, doing extremely impressive work, that makes funding so competitive. And when funding is competitive, it's no wonder that funders prefer to fund people who have produced something and told the world about it ("publish").

3. Fraudsters and hucksters have been in science forever. Go read an account of science in the early 19th century. There are tons and tons of stories of crazy scientists who believed ridiculous things, scientists who kept pushing wrong dogma, and so on. And yet nobody knows about them today, because the evolutionary process of science works: the truths that are empirically verifiable win out, and, given enough time, the failures are selected against.

Bit too on the nose, maybe, but a heck of a lot more likely than a coverup by government scientists.

Bluesky has recapitulated or even surpassed peak sci twitter. The signal:noise is excellent. However, it requires some work because there is no algorithm. Aggressively unfollow people with low signal:noise, use the custom feeds that disable reposts and enable replies, use the Quiet Posters feed, and use sill.social. This has created a science feed that for me surpasses even the peak of Twitter, let alone X today which is unusable for scientific discussion.

Finally, the thing that drives me crazy is that Bluesky is literally a popular open-source, nonprofit, Ad-less, algorithm-less, truly free and partially decentralized social media network. It's what we all dreamed about in the 2010s! It's Mastodon but actually popular! But half the tech community have convinced themselves it's a "liberal bubble" (that anyone can join....) and that the website that apparently isn't a bubble is the, err, website run by a billionaire with an algorithm designed to promote certain political content that agrees with that billionaire. Absolutely bizarre situation.

I do distinguish between being nice and reasonably and truly "hearing someone out" though. To me, the difference is that when truly hearing someone out, you will be interrogating the exact data and logic behind the validity of their individual claims to their fullest extent. This is how I would respond to e.g., a scientific work that I view as potentially valid, serious, and important.

However, in some cases, I have found (and suspect in general) doing so can be counter-productive. Here is one example: a recent report made by climate change deniers using AI: https://xcancel.com/RWMaloneMD/status/1903468473579340261

Regardless of the motivations of the original authors, thousands of well-meaning people have now boosted or referenced this work as part of their rejection of climate change. But I don't think this work should be "heard out" in the sense that every single claim in it should be addressed by a skeptic of the work, the way one would approach a serious scientific work. This takes a ton of time and effort and is simply infeasible - and often draws one into an endless back and forth where individual points get lost. Rather, in this case I'd focus on describing the general epistemic errors being made, and heuristics that can be used to avoid these errors.

Another case I guess is the OP article. This article is apparently written by someone who is a believer in parapsychology! I believe there is little to be gained for me to spend time evaluating the claims of parapsychologists: in that sense, I am a "bad skeptic" according to the author. But it is really just not an appropriate use of my time. Rather, I would argue from a position of general skepticism and logical positivism and remind others that these are extraordinarily claims that if true, would imply so much of what we know about the world is wrong.

I hope my distinction here makes sense now. My reading of the OP is he isn't just saying "be nice", but "take us seriously". I think we've got to try our best to be nice. But to take something seriously is a much bigger ask, and one that is not necessarily always beneficial in every circumstance.

I also don't really think there is any money per se in "shilling" for pharma, at least for like, 99% of doctors and scientists. Pretty much all doctors and scientists I know who dedicated a lot of time to communicating on covid-19, including studying ivermectin, running the trials on it that failed, didn't really get any extra money for doing so. Just a lot of hate mail.

I think there's a third way between "hear them out" and "online atheist", and that's basically a kind and gentle dialogue questioning pseudoscientific ideas while still focusing on trying to make clear the cognitive errors they are likely making.

LLMs are actually pretty good at this [1], which is remarkable, because LLMs are pretty stupid, and rarely knowledgeable about the details or nuances of any particular debate, especially on niche scientific topics. Like Ken Ham would "win" a debate about creationism with chatGPT because he's familiar with all of the tricky creationist arguments about radioisotype dating that ChatGPT isn't. But if we look at why AI typically succeeds in debunking conspiracy theorists when "online atheists" fail, I think it is because AI has infinite patience and respect for the user, where-as any online human debater eventually loses their patience, whether with an individual or over time. Being able to share new information with people while also being patient and respectful is basically this secret but it's just incredibly difficult to a person to do it.

Figuring out how to teach a generation of skeptics that aren't burnt out, jaded, and angry, is probably the secret sauce here to fighting misinformation.

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq1814

Well first and foremost to these people:

https://pepfar.impactcounter.com/ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/children-die-after-usaid-... https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2025/tracking-anticipat... https://www.npr.org/2025/05/28/nx-s1-5413322/aid-groups-say-... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01191-z

So even completely eliminating these agencies wouldn't put a dent in the US government's deficit. But doing so would be sighted, because these agencies and programs also have a long-term return on investment. They are economic wealth generators, not money-spenders, and they are being cut.

So there are two reasons that this debate has clearly nothing to do with cutting spending. This is simply factual. Why do you and others keep claiming it does? Especially when the Trump administration is proposing a new budget that cuts all of these things and also greatly increases the US debt?

The federal budget is not hard to balance, and there are basically three paths: (a) raise taxes, especially on the rich, (b) cut defense spending, (c) cut Medicare and Social Security spending.

I just wish we could have the actual argument. If you do not like new medicines, clean water, space travel, saving millions of lives in Africa from HIV, then say so, and let's have that debate! But can we stop pretending it is about fiscal conservation?

If Texans want to fund a military parade for $45 million, and spend $16 billion on an armed secret police force, they are welcome to do so, but then Californians should not have to fund that (and neither do the rest of us who do not agree with such things while producing an outsized portion of the federal government's income).

The issue is not which of these are federally funded vs state funded, unless of course the federal income tax for Californians is specifically reduced in turn. It's a zero sum game: as a Californian, your tax dollars (whether state or federal) are now going to more objectively horrible things and few fewer objectively good things. That's the problem.

I don't think we should exaggerate - "pausing meaningful work indefinitely" is an exaggeration - but the Trump administration has already definitely decimated biological research country-wide in a manner we have not seen in our lifetime. This is the biggest story among scientists in the country right now.

The upcoming 2026 budget will be its own battle, but what has already happened in 2025 is devastating. The budget is there, as you point out, but it is not being spent. It's worth pointing out this is all being sued in at least a dozen or so lawsuits, and is likely to be found highly illegal in most forms, but the damage has already been done, and the administration will find new creative ways to get around court orders.

Please see: https://jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.github.io/index.htm... https://grant-watch.us/reports.html https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/03/trump-nih... https://apnews.com/article/trump-science-medicine-research-c... https://pepfar.impactcounter.com/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/04/health/trump-... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/22/upshot/nsf-gr... https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/health/national-institute... https://www.statnews.com/2025/05/08/trump-nih-cuts-jama-stud... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/health/usaid-contract-ter... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/15/opinion/forei... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/health/usaid-funding-dise...

Let's say that, unlike pretty much most Americans, you think none of those are worth the comparatively tiny overall costs in the USGOV budget.

OK. And then let's say, you also dispute or otherwise disagree with the likelihood that most of those actually return a net economic ROI for our country.

OK. And then let's say you also dispute the likelihood that despite their minor costs, and despite their positive ROI, the sheer chaotic nature of this approach is wasting a ton of money by gumming up the federal government and creating dozens of lawsuits for weeks.

Fine. So despite the tiny costs, positive ROI, and inefficiency of this approach, there's still a massive economic issue being caused here.

When you cancel ongoing legal federal contracts, you are telling every private contractor loud and clear: you cannot trust the US government to keep their legally binding word. Price that in.

That will in fact be priced in going forward now and cost us dearly. Disastrously stupid.

2. That court case is for undergraduate admissions - what does it have to do with hiring practices in the academic sciences?

Here's his original reporting where he describes this: https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/5-tips-for-using-...

Kudos to the kid for breaking the story before other media sources, but the actual scientific investigative work here was done by people with scientific training

In that sense, you've committed three errors in your response, but the primary fourth error is in avoiding the actual subject at hand, which is still the fact that these governmental actions will not reduce spending, so your original claim was incorrect.