"In the early 20th century, the Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset warned that such resentment would eventually become the enemy of talent and ability. “The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different,” he wrote in 1930, “everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.” Trump and Musk not only feel this same impulse; they have harnessed it for their personal use.

Eventually, such attacks run out of steam when the costs begin to accumulate. No matter how many times Stalin told his scientists to plant wheat in the snow so that it could evolve to grow in the winter, the wheat (which had no political allegiances) died. Today, vaccine refusal might seem like a brave stand against white-jacketed overlords—until your children are stricken with measles or whooping cough.

Modern societies, as Americans are soon to learn, cannot function without experts in every field, especially the many thousands who work in public service. The first step in containing the damage is to see Trump’s and Musk’s goals for DOGE clearly: It is a project rooted in resentful arrogance, and its true objective is not better government, but destruction."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/career-civil-servant-end/681712/

#USA #Trump #Musk #Populism #Expertise #DOGE

The Open Notebook: Using Open Data to Sharpen Science Stories. “Many reporters are familiar with the idea of using data to bring nuance and depth to a story. They may draw from public government data, such as census data or COVID-19 dashboards, for example. But, as my team’s research suggests, journalists aren’t widely utilizing the vast troves of freely accessible data that researchers […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/01/30/the-open-notebook-using-open-data-to-sharpen-science-stories/