Removing something critical and seeing what happens is a methodology used by Musk in all his companies: remove LIDAR from self driving car, remove flame trench from spaceship launch pad, etc. Results may vary.
"Results may vary" is not an acceptable methodology for the US Government, when millions of lives are potentially at stake.
Ed: among the ways millions of lives could be lost: losing control of our nuclear arsenal or nuclear materials due to haphazardly firing people responsible for maintaining them. Bungling the response to the next pandemic, due to haphazardly firing people, cutting science funding and deleting inconvenient data. Starvation and disease from ceasing aid around the world. There's also the wars likely to result from the collapse of trust in the US as a security partner, but I suppose it's not correct to blame that on DOGE per se, even if it's an extension of the same principle.
> Bungling the response to the next pandemic, due to haphazardly firing people, cutting science funding and deleting inconvenient data.
That’s possible, however, it’s possible it’ll give a chance to remove autocrats who have suppressed the scientific method in favor of their prevailing opinions or preferences.
There will be a painful period but it could rejuvenate the systems.
But consider, what if we rejuvenated our health infrastructure in a way that isn't blazingly incompetent? Suppose you learned enough about the systems currently being smashed to specifically fire the "autocrats" and leave the competent people? Are you seeing where the importance of detail comes in?
At this point, I've presented a handful of fairly straightforward hypotheses about cause and effect. They could be wrong, but it's on you to show that they're actually self-referential. There is no amount or kind of other people's opinions that will make them so.
That's equally true of all internet comments. None of us here on HN have or are claiming automatic credibility. We just make arguments that make sense to us. Feel free to close the tab if you don't find any value in this activity.
You don't think his comment is "an assumption put forward for the purposes of discussion"? That seems a fairly low and generic bar for a comment to reach...
Truthfully, I hold those ideas a little more confidently than purely "for the purposes of discussion", but I suspect you at least understand that the real-world usage of "hypothesis" is quite broad.
I'm kind of tickled at the idea that a "hypothesis" is some hyper-specific thing with trappings of "credibility", and that anything less would be an insult, like we're not all just a bunch of nerds arguing on the internet. It's also kind of sad, though. This is why computer people need liberal arts education.
Yeah, hence why I asked… otherwise anyone on HN, including me, could say their opinions are hypotheses too, to be taken just as seriously as the parent’s.
Sometimes people (e.g. US voters) will only learn by running into a wall. How all exactly will turn out is hard to tell and frankly maybe we better don't know. I'm tending to the conclusion there's no way around the movement of the big picture, the shifting of geo-political order in the world.
My friend is a doctor. Her profession uses sections of the NIH and CDC websites on a daily basis. They are the references for drug interactions with medical conditions. These sections are just gone.
Trump’s “cost saving” measures are already actively harming medical treatment in the USA.
I doubt adding paywalls and more 3rd parties will help reverse the trend of rising healthcare costs. But also, just why? Why not keep this information that our tax dollars have already paid for in the public domain? I thought we were supposed to care about efficiency and that information wanted to be free.
