I do not agree with your postulate that funding any medical research necessarily brings "long-term benefits for society and also result in a net increase in happiness and productivity".

Surely that needs proving. And it seems quite hard for the argument trivially collapses if said research is done by incompetents who misinterpret results, is done by frauds who fake the results, or if the money given is squandered isntead of researching, or if the research results are not written down and shared.

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teiferer a day ago | parent [-]

And you are saying that those misuses of money were happening at Harvard?

Must be really easy to get a research position there if every idiot fraud is able to.

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vntok a day ago | parent [-]

> And you are saying that those misuses of money were happening at Harvard?

Out of a more than $2.6B research grant package, yes I do feel pretty certain that there's some misuse happening. Don't you? Misuses of money routinely happen in all sorts of places on much much lower amounts of grants/donations, so what do you think makes Harvard immune to it?

There's also the fact that the institution seems open to settling, an indicator among others that they aren't confident in their ability to sustain an audit (per the NYT: "Harvard Is Said to Be Open to Spending Up to $500 Million to Resolve Trump Dispute" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/us/politics/trump-harvard...)

> Must be really easy to get a research position there if every idiot fraud is able to.

Indeed. Presumably this is a reason for the Trump admin's demand that Harvard turn over employment forms for university staff. The good news is that Harvard seems to be complying (per The Guardian: "Harvard to comply with Trump officials’ demand to turn over employment forms" https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jul/29/harvard-tr...), so if there's anything the admin disagrees with we're sure to hear all about it soon.

	▲	teiferer 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hm interesting. You seem to assume that cutting funding by 20% will cut exactly the fraudulent parts. That naïve world view is quite impressive tbh. >> Must be really easy to get a research position there if every idiot fraud is able to. > Indeed. [...] Hm alright. About 10 of my friends have tried over the years to get into Harvard for research positions, only 2 of them succeeded. I must be surrounded by stupid idots then. Not clear to me how the rest of your text provides any supporting argument (what does providing employment forms have to do with it?) but I'm likely just as stupid as my friends.