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Comment by gosub100 | Hacker News Reader

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Your framing of the question suggests you believe in ideology, because you're posing a purity based based on hypotheticals alone. Where is the actual data for DOGE, in any department doing science?

Show me someone without ideology and I'll sell you a clock in London

That's a great way to always be right: just claim the data that disputes your position is non-existent.

You have not made an argument based on data, you made an argument based on having wishful thinking about Doge and what the government will do with "the savings".

Don't lie, I didn't make any such claim. I just asked you to provide teh data that you say informs your position.

Uh, this is easy to refute if the data exists.

>What if DOGE savings create more money for important science?

>Your answer to this question determines whether you believe in ideology or data.

I've upvoted your comment to give you time to show us your data.

A recent senate report says the government spent >$21 billion in the last 6 months on salaries for people who cannot work because of DOGE.

There’s one data point against the original comments assumption or intention

Interesting reason to upvote. Would have never thought of it but kinda makes sense!

> What if DOGE savings

These savings are not material. And if they were they wouldn’t matter—the Congress blew out our deficit by trillions irrespective of anything DOGE did.

> Your answer to this question determines whether you believe in ideology or data.

I mean, you're technically right, but that doesn't invalidate anything the parent commenter said.

I could equally ask "What if it turned out that turpentine was actually _healthier_ than water?".

Like, yeah, if that assertion turned out to be the case and you rejected the new data, you'd be following dogma rather than data. That doesn't mean that the assertion is likely to actually be true though.

If there was a coherent plan in DOGE to make more money available to do important science, maybe that could work. However, nothing DOGE has done has shown any sort of logic in terms of outcome maximization. The collection of activities (partly DOGE, partly Trump org) applied to scientists has been super-impactful (in an entirely negative way) for science we already know is important

The pool of skilled scientists to be hired shrinks when you cut funding in arbitrary ways.

Considering the platform is budget cuts (yet an increased deficit) and science denial, I'm going to rate this hypothetical "highly unlikely".

Can you share any data on your "What ifs"?

Basic research is important science and is in societies best interest to support it.

A quote from Carl Sagan’s, Demon Haunted World.

> We are rarely smart enough to set about on purpose making the discoveries that will drive our economy and safeguard our lives. Often, we lack the fundamental research. Instead, we pursue a broad range of investigations of Nature, and applications we never dreamed of emerge. Not always, of course. But often enough.

https://archive.org/details/B-001-001-709

He's absolutely right. Long-shot research with little to no immediate applicability has been the basis for innumerable breakthroughs over the years. If DOGE existed back in the 70s, 80s, or 90s, we wouldn't have mRNA vaccines[0], Google[1] (or the modern internet for that matter[2]), and many modern cancer treatments[3], to name but a few examples of research that would have been easy to brand as wasteful and not "important science".

[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9975718/

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016975529...

[2]: https://www.nsf.gov/impacts/internet

[3]: https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/impact-nih-research/improving-...

has doge actually saved any money overall? it seems like spending is still up, so

There's no scenario where messing with a working system people rely on and then getting rid of everyone who understood it will produce a savings. What DOGE has done would simply destroy a corporation, and we know this because we've helped corporations perform this kind of system analysis and understand the cost of change.

We're at a point right now where we can't even calculate the damage Musk has done, where the discovery process on that issue alone will be a multi-million years long effort. We're looking at large-scale remediation projects on every system Trump gave him access to because the cost of not doing that is functionally unknowable. E.g. every table DOGE had the ability to change is now a legal liability per row.

There are many counter-factual hypotheticals like this in common speech.

"if pigs could fly"

"when hell freezes over"

"when Trump and the GOP care about truth"

They all mean the same thing.

exactly, you worship an ideology. That's my point. The claim that saving government funds could actually help fund research (or have other positive effects) is a foregone conclusion. So you close your mind to the possibility because it would force you to agree with Trump on something, but your ideology (not unlike a militant islamic jihadist) has already prescribed you to declare "that side" as the enemy. That's why I said in another comment on this thread, that you (liberals) will deny any evidence that doesn't support your claim. And seeing how badly I was downvoted on my parent comment, it's clear they do NOT want to be forced to admit this about their tribe. It's a religion. you may not have a church or a leadership structure, but you believe what your tribe says, on faith. and most of you are atheists, so it jibs with the theory that you replaced the love-of-god (from your previous generations, where statistically your ancestors were religious) with love-of-government. That theory fits tighter than a glove to explain the turn-your-brain-off-and-believe state of modern leftism. Especially in a forum such as this, where the content is otherwise much more intellectual.

What if we found leprechauns and they gave us their pots of gold, think of all the scientists we could hire then! Certainly we should be prioritizing the leprechaun search.

What if doge does something it's not doing? Yeah that might make it good, but they're not.

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