The fact is that we can judge institutions and organizations like we judge people: Both by what they say of themselves but also what they do. It’s no different than like trying to hire a new guy for your place of work, you don’t go only by what they say of themselves but also by their history and record.
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Maybe I’m not “one of the scientists” here, who knows. I’ve already opined that Turner seems to be making stuff up.
Turner tells a story about Trump’s suggestion to cut the indirect costs rate for NIH-funded projects to 10%. Turner seems to think that this would save taxpayers money, but I would argue that he hasn’t really thought this through.
One example - indirect costs pay, among other things, for the administration of Institutional Biosafety Committees. Take away this mechanism, and institutions would be faced with charging for this necessity as a direct cost. Either way, the politics of institutions (if the IBC was wholly internally-funded) or the forces of the market (if institutions outsourced this activity) would not lead to any sort of cost savings, but rather would see an escalation in the costs of this essential service. Worse still, the reliability of the output of IBCs would deleteriously affected. Higher costs, greater risks of accidents related to biohazards - this seems to be Turner’s vision.
One may certainly complain about indirect costs, the money trail, and administrative bloat (not nearly as intertwined as Turner implies), and I often do. But Turner’s vision is nonsensical.
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No, because it’s ahistorical garbage.
Its failure to mention the major reforms to the indirect cost system that occurred in the early 1990s are a massive tell demonstrating that the author is engaging in polemics.
We know all about it, far more than you do.
It is and it won’t be.
The description of peptidyl transferase as a protein by Meyer, Dembski, and Wells is inaccurate. Will it ever be corrected? IIRC it’s been more than a decade.
The number of papers he had published is not the relevant metric. Numbers of federal grants would be.
There’s far more interest in those facts and figures from us than there is from you regarding facts and figures in biology. 
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Well, to be fair, the author could be an important member of the organization while simultaneously being a profoundly unimportant person in general. 
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Ron:
Thanks for attempting a substantive response to Turner’s article. This is the sort of analysis and response I was hoping for – on topic in relation to the article, measured in tone, etc. It’s interesting that you say you are not a scientist, yet you are the one who has given the most substantive response to Turner in terms of the realities of current science, whereas those who are or claim claim to be scientists have more or less ignored the article, or dismissed it as a “rant”, or focused on alleged motivations rather than on the substance of the article’s argument.
I certainly agree that modern scientific research is expensive, and I agree that this is one reason why state funding has become such a big component of overall funding. I also agree with you that Turner needs to lay out more clearly what his alternative system would look like. However, that doesn’t mean Turner is wrong to point out some of the problems with the current system. His article is a consciousness-raising one, to get people to recognize a problem. I think it’s a necessary first step toward a better system to notice flaws in the current one. He’s trying to get a dialogue started. And it doesn’t help when the response of some people to that attempt is to invent sinister motivations for using the acronym NAS or to talk about Wikipedia’s characterization of an entirely different organization.
Maybe Turner’s analysis is faulty, and maybe his proposed alternative is flawed or impossible, but if so, a responsible answer to article would have to run along the lines of yours, not along the lines of some of the responses we’ve seen here. Indeed, the obviously political character of some of those responses is another indication of the very problem he’s talking about, i.e., that scientists are increasingly allowing political motivations to affect the scientific enterprise.
Thanks again for trying to stick to the high ground and address the substance rather than the alleged motivations of Turner’s article. This isn’t the first time your contribution has raised the level of the discussion here, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.
As if Faizal knew anything about the NAS, or had even heard of the NAS, before I posted this topic. But now, from a few quick lookups (one them about an organization that is not the NAS!) on Wikipedia, without bothering to write to any NAS members or converse with them, he knows all about it. The pretentiousness here is stunning. But of course, it’s not news here that people will condemn books they haven’t read, and condemn organizations they only first heard of yesterday, based on scraps of rumor and hearsay. It’s par for the course around here.
Thanks for your second reply. It is much more substantive, giving reasons rather than sneers for your disagreement with Turner. It’s the sort of answer I was looking for. (By way of contrast, Mercer’s second reply is just more sneers.).
Um, Turner’s suggestion that we return to the era of “small science” is pretty much the bottom line of his essay. Not “a proposal to the author that did not correspond to what the author actually argued”.
Did you actually read the essay, @Eddie ?
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Indeed. There is a reason why I used scare quotes. But it is very telling that such a claim would appear in this article.
My understanding comes from industry but the 50% figure doesn’t seem at all unreasonable. A 10% figure sounds very low - and I really wonder how administration and general facilities costs could be so little.
Concerning the politicization of science and its harmful consequences:
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Usually I would, but since you’ve already decided on no evidence or history whatsoever that I might be misrepresenting it, while your own history suggests you won’t read it anyway, I won’t waste my time.
Here’s a suggestion: if you want to misquote, don’t do so with the original text still visible.
Without some quoted material from the report, or a pinpointing of the passages from which you are deriving this statement, it’s impossible to tell whether you are accurately representing the report. You may be leaving out relevant context.
[/quote]
As some-one who frequently requests others give the benefit of the doubt, you ought to practise what you preach.
You could have found the article yourself in less time than it took to type that paragraph.
Me, Art and djkriese is more than “two”.
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Paul, you seem to object to this statement from Turner’s article:
I suspect that Jerry Coyne would agree that this sometimes happens. His strong protests against the attempt to replace science proper in the New Zealand science curriculum with “science” based on the “Maori worldview” concerns indicates that he has noted the increasing politicization of science education, and I don’t think Wikipedia would count Jerry Coyne as a right-wing extremist. And while the example I’ve picked from Coyne is about teaching rather than research, it’s pretty obvious that the problem pointed out by Coyne has been creeping into not only education but research. I have in the past here mentioned Doreen Kimura, who protested that in her field (Psychology), political correctness coming from feminist theorists was preventing an objective scientific analysis of the different developmental patterns in male and female brains. (I.e., psychologists weren’t to talk about male-female biological differences, even where they really existed, lest that encourage sexism.) And that complaint came decades ago; political correctness has grown in strength since then and threatens to corrupt most of the natural sciences in one way or another. Of course, those in the humanities and social sciences have had to fight this corruption of academic life by political correctness for a long time, but scientists, it seems, are only starting to notice it as a serious problem in the past few years (though people like Kimura tried to warn them many years earlier), probably because until recently it hasn’t impinged on most of the their work, and was perceived of as a humanities or social science problem, and therefore of no concern to scientists. But now scientists are beginning to wake up, and I think that scientists and humanities scholars should be joining hands, as allies, to prevent the politicization of the university research in all fields, and I applaud the NAS for bringing together a biologist like Turner and various humanities scholars, in order to fight this political tide.
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Yes, exactly. It’s like saying “Discussion of the latest findings in astronomy, by an Important Member of the Flat Earth Society.”
I did not, and I have not so much as suggested anything to the contrary. But I’m not the one who felt compelled to inform everyone here of this article by an Important Member of an organization of very little importance. If I had felt so compelled, I would have first done my due diligence. Word to the wise.
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Your shabby excuse for not indicating your source is noted.
You could have given the reference yourself in even less time.
Can you please explain how these two things are the same:
Art Hunt today: “Turner’s suggestion that we return to the era of “small science”.”
Art Hunt in his first post above: “To make science better, Turner seems to think that it should be the purview (more like playground) of people who are independently wealthy, or who manage to find wealthy and eccentric patrons (Ellie Arroway and S. R. Hadden, Alan Grant/Ellie Sattler and John Hammond).”
In Art’s mind, apparently these two things are the same, but other readers here, such as myself, may need some of the middle steps filled in, by which he arrived at the equation of the two. I have no problem with the first and shorter statement of the two I’ve quoted above, but the second statement is not a meaning of Turner’s article that I would naturally have arrived at. (And I certainly don’t think that science should be open only to the wealthy, so if I thought Turner meant that, I would have expressed disagreement with him.)
By the way, Art, you are responding here to my reply to your first response. Since I wrote that reply, you gave another response, and in another reply, I told you that your second response was more substantive and helpful. It was grouped with a reply to Faizal, but well-marked with an @Art in it. Have a look at it.
Gilbert:
Thanks for posting this link to an article by two well-trained professors/MDs/epidemiologists. It’s good for the public to know that the “consensus science” on some of these questions (specifically, regarding the vaccination of very young children) is not monolithic, and that there is difference of opinion among those with scientific training and practical medical expertise. It is also relevant to the concerns in the Turner article, in a broad way, since it deals to some extent with the politicization of science. However, since discussing the article in detail would (given the tendency of some people here) rapidly degenerate into a debate about COVID response in general, and would deflect attention from the Turner article which is the topic here, I won’t pursue it.
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I would certainly object to it as applied to climate change. In fact that is exactly what I did.
Since that is in New Zealand it hardly has much to do with the situation in the US, and it certainly isn’t seeking research funds from the US government. Since you choose to focus on that rather than on climate change - explicitly mentioned in the quote -I conclude that you cannot defend that assertion and instead resort to diversion.
The situation in psychology, while perhaps more relevant is still a different issue (although the possibility of right-wing activism in such research cannot be neglected).
I note that you are applauding blatant hypocrisy.
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You have not established that anything is hypocritical. Which of the stated goals of the organization do you find to be “hypocritical”? I listed several things in my reply to Faizal above:
Why is an organization that stands for the above things “hypocritical”? And why is bringing together a biologist like Scott Turner with humanities scholars etc. to fight for a freer intellectual climate in the modern university “hypocritical”?
If you disagree with Turner regarding climate change, or something else, that’s fine – the whole point of the NAS is to promote open and fair academic and public debate on such issues. But Turner is hardly a “hypocrite” for disagreeing with your position. Can’t one disagree with your view on climate change without being a “hypocrite”? I don’t see why you’re using such a hot-button word, instead of just calmly stating the strengths and weaknesses of the article Turner wrote.
This is reasonable
If anyone cares, this is the spot where I really ought to have cut off discussion. 
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You haven’t done due diligence in even one of your replies on this topic, so your claim that if you had been the one to introduce the subject, you would have done due diligence, is not credible.
As always, you ignore most of my substantive points. You have completely ducked this challenge:
Are you against the things with the NAS was founded to promote – the things listed in its mission statement? Or are you in favor of them? If you’re in favor of them, why so much hostility toward the NAS? And if you’re not in favor of them, please specify your preferred set of alternate goals. For example, would you rather see “quotas” than “individual merit” determine who gets academic jobs? Would rather see “unbalanced” than “fair” examination of contending views? Would you rather see “impassioned advocacy” than “reasoned scholarship?” Do let us know what your ideal university, and your ideal world, would look like.