I was watching Kubrick’s "2001" last night and was struck by the way disaster resulted from:
Over-reliance on technology yoked to
A mania for secrecy, and
the coincidence that 2001 was the year we installed a President who exhibits both.
Those two flaws are of course compounded by a deliberate ignorance of the scientific method and misuse of peer review on experimental and research results. That secrecy fetish works directly against something you want your scientists to do: share information and build on each other’s work, while minimizing overlap in applied and pure research.
This witch’s brew is made worse by a moral climate that values loyalty to the hierarchy above all else- in all fairness, a well-developed phenomenon in the Clinton years.
When you throw in a willful anti-democratic approach to politics ("If you act like you have an electoral mandate, you have a mandate."), here we are. The topper-what does it mean for the future? is that this cavalier and ad hoc utilitarian approach to science will put us into the hole for years to come.
Will foreign-born hard sciences students come to the rescue?
Not likely, with the obstacles and hassles we put in their way, at the borders and post-entry into the US. And the Right is once again mixing into this equation, by drumming up a fear of those wily Orientals, the Chinese. With that decades-long-lived magnet drawing world class researchers turned off, we are likely to become what Romney described in a speech recently to the Hard Right, "The France of the 21st Century". He was referring, I suppose, to military might.
But we all know that soldiers in the field are sustained and protected by a strong economy and good science and technology. What could easily happen is that France, long a great second rater in many technical fields, passes the US by virtue not of them rising but America falling off in science, technology, and engineering.
Viva, paradox and irony!