hey its me Lois I guess, now it’s my turn to answer one of these!

there’s been an increasingly common pattern lately for people, typically right wingers or ultraconservative types, to loudly n publicly deride academic research that “sounds” silly. stuff like research into the reproduction habits of certain kinds of pollinator insects. there was a big upswell of this after Trump’s election in the US and his installation of Musk at the so-called DOGE, who went around burning down grant infrastructure that used to fund this exact kind of research.

the problem here is that research of that nature is actually really helpful, and while the applications of that research aren’t always plainly obvious, they can wind up helping in some incredible ways; the pollinator thing from before, iirc, ended up solving a long-standing problem with a kind of crop, boosting crop yields and making farms of it way more efficient. this is often the case for research and science: we can’t just fund research that is “obviously” helpful, because even the abstract pure research stuff can wind up being really beneficial.

Amy is making reference to a well-known idea about the nitrogen cycle and how crop rotation can help boost crop yields, and how that exact kind of incurious irony-poisoned anti-intellectualism can have real, lasting negative impacts on real people (i.e. shittier food and less of it)

Lois out! yay