The Youcut Citizen Review of Government

We are launching an experiment – the first YouCut Citizen Review of a government agency. Together, we will identify wasteful spending that should be cut and begin to hold agencies accountable for how they are spending your money.

A really horrible idea: have lay people suggest research to cut by looking for “questionable” grants. Based on what? The scientific illiteracy possessed and cherished by a large fraction of the populace? Given the kind of ridicule that politicians themselves display toward science (in particular, anything remotely related to evolution or genetics), I would expect a parade of suggestions based solely on ideology, cutting anything related not only to evolution, but also global warming and any behavioral studies that want to look at conduct that doesn’t mirror that of the Cunninghams from Happy Days.

The site uses as an example “$750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players.” Of course, it turns out that it’s more than that. There is no reference to the grant (or grants), but someone has already tracked this down. The project was an effort to objectively measure individuals’ performance, and soccer was used in the preliminary work, but an application was for workers in a business setting. As far as I can tell, the soccer model was only part of the work funded by the grant. You can’t build a complex model from scratch, so you work your way up using a system that’s more easily investigated. This isn’t really all that subtle a notion, in the scheme of things scientific, but it’s lost here.

If these politicians can’t grasp that, there isn’t much hope that they would grasp the concept of funding a lot of basic research, because most of it ends up not panning out. It’s research. It means investigating the unknown, where there can be no guarantee of success. But as our representatives in government, it really is their job to know this. Pandering like this is just an example of abandoning their responsibilities. It’s sickening.