No, you can't just replace science with Silicon Valley

Profit and science rarely mix well

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

New directives from on high, shouted from a governmental megaphone at scientists, might not be so bad if they were clear. But since they are very much unclear, there is a new mood among my fellow scientists: paranoia. I don’t remember this ever happening before.

The director of the National Science Foundation—which, for all major scientific fields, except biology/medicine, is the main federal funder of basic research—resigned yesterday after the NSF was ordered to be cut by 55%. Meanwhile, the NIH (biology/medicine) is proposed to be cut by 40%, and NASA’s science division by 50%. These numbers will likely change to some degree in Congress, but the proposals are already having tangible effects everywhere. Science has, in terms of inflows of funding, been slowed to a trickle in 2025.

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To litigate all that led to this, politically, would take a book. The stated reason for the cuts to science is obvious, best seen in the fight between the Trump administration and Harvard around the role of DEI requirements in admissions, hiring, and grants. But let’s just be honest: that doesn’t explain cutting 55% of the NSF budget.

Thus, the unstated reason is worth examining. If you criticize academia as a sclerotic and ailing institution, then you are a doctor, and should be seeking cures. If you view ideological creep within science as cancer, then the goal is to kill the cancer and keep the patient. Yet, there’s a new nihilism based on the idea that academia is entirely corrupt. And things entirely corrupt are not worth saving.

It’s a view only possible if an alternative is available. Academia houses the crown jewel of science. If academia is not to be saved, where does science go?

A possible hint comes from the current Science Advisor to the President: Michael Kratsios. As far as I can tell, he is the first confirmed in that position, created 49 years ago, to not actually be a scientist. There’s not one scientific citation to his name. But he does have deep ties to Silicon Valley, and was even Peter Thiel’s former chief of staff.

Of course, I don’t know what Trump or Kratsios personally believes. But I do think that the nihilistic view of academia, at least more nebulously at a cultural level, is fed by a whisper: Why not just do a little swap? Why not trade all those pompous ivy-covered campuses for something slicker and less janky? Why not take the crown jewel of science and box it up in a package white and molded, like an Apple product?