Earlier quoted context omitted.
Democracy involves rule of law.
In a sense, but not in the sense of all the political branches having to run every decision by lawyers and judges.
So judicial review is out too?
Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone
461–470 of 587 posts
Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone
#462This is true for many programs for reasons that will be hard to understand if you aren't a scientist. The NSF program managers are often pulled out of academia for brief periods of their career to do various tasks as experts. This means they are often probationary. This is the only way to hire people with deep expertise on the topic-du-jour. The trump administration fired in wide swaths many probationary employees at…
In addition to these scientists, I heard from my friends in academia that they will be taking fewer PhD students because they're unsure of the funding. We may be looking at a lost decade.
1. Most science PhD students are international. So funding their education has questionable domestic political value.
2. Those people don’t just disappear. If there aren’t PhD programs they will do something else.
3. It’s hard to argue we are at some optimal level of PhD students and that if we cut back the system won’t work. Most academics agree we have too many.
Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
to steelman the issue: what if there was overinvestment in science? as in we chased money after talent that didnt exist, or was mismatched to the difficulty of the available and fundable open questions. a few things: you'd expect a lot of fraud and misallocated science to have been recently uncovered. after the cuts, you would expect the quantity of science to go down, but the quality to go up
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go get a degree in science and come back with your take.
Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about constant attacks by Republicans on whose votes counts? It's happening again right now https://www.propublica.org/article/north-carolina-voters-jef... They justify these actions to their voters by lying about election fraud or exaggerating the issue.
Did you read this article? > The state election board and a Donald Trump-appointed federal judge have dismissed Griffin’s argument that the missing information should invalidate votes. The protests you speak of have already been dismissed (the last link in the quoted section). Seems like the system is working as intended, even under ostensibly adversarial conditions?
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Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you show us some statistics to back that up? From the time of brexit until now seems like a good time period.
There you are: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?... Only Italy has done substantially better, but that is recovery from the aftermath of the 2008 collapse.
Er... that chart shows the UK GDP per capita about on par with France's (even slightly higher) until 2018, and from then on it has been consistently below France - not by a lot, but still noticeable...
Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
there are two tiers of program managers. there are those that are pulled from academia, as you say, but theres a 3-5x? multiple of "junior' PMs that are say MS or BS scientists, rarely PhD (usually the case when the PhD is... subpar), these are career and eventually thet are promoted to senior management and decision making roles.
I don’t know what the distribution of advanced degrees is among NSF program managers, but I strongly reject the implication that career program managers are somehow a lower tier or less well suited for the job. I’ve personally served a few times as an NSF panel reviewer for a career PM that does not hold a PhD, and they are awesome. They have a background in the startup world and ask really insightful question and kn…
yeah well i worked with a high level DARPA PM that it turned out her phd was overinterpreting noise and her PI (francesco stellaci) railroaded the postdoc that tried to call foul. by the way, that PM, last i checked had left DARPA and was working on a microfluidics nanodrop blood diagnostics company -- you cant mke this shit up!! and a DOE biotechnology pm that was excited to be on the project -- but by his own admission couldn't remember what a promoter was. fucking clown cars.
> you don’t need a formal CS degree to be a great software dev.
not at all the same. the point here is about incentive structure. If you're a great scientist, why aren't you doing the science? something made you decide instead to be a career bureaucrat.
Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I'm not from "the other side" as I don't align with either party, but I do live in a very red part of the country. In the short term, as I understand it, the goal is to root out fraud and abuse. For decades many people from both sides of the aisle have believed the government wastes money, that is nothing new. The current moves somewhat rhyme with the early Clinton administration. Whether that is Trump's goal or…
This has zero to do with rooting put fraud, this is literally making goverment more corrupt. And the whole "democrats are Marxists" talking point is ridiculous. There are no paralels here, just a authoritarian and anti democratic movement successfully demonizing other side regardless of truth.
You're being too black and white here in my opinion.
From what I've seen we don't yet have a clear vision of what their end goals really are. They've talked about waste and fraud, and what they've done so far could be to that end. Going out a layer and you find people around them, and Project 2025, that seem to talk much more towards privatizing the government. I haven't seen enough to know which way it will go, but its been moving so quickly that I can't keep up with everything.
I didn't say "democrats are Marxists" and I didn't intend to imply that. To say there are no parallels is disingenuous at best. Wealth distribution is a great example that is common in both groups, as is anticapitalist and anti-meritocratic views and policies.
That doesn't mean democrats are Marxists or that the party is Marxist. It does, though, mean that there are policies many Democratic voters or politicians support that align with arguments Marx made (and that doesn't inherently mean the ideas are bad ones).
Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a modern nation, it’s not tenable to flush the federal government down the toilet every four years.
To the contrary, in a modern, diverse country, it’s not tenable for the same people to keep running the government in the same way regardless of who wins elections. That was okay when we had a more homogenous, slower-changing country with widely shared values. That’s untenable today.
There's a good argument to be made that the role of bureaucracy in our government is to intentionally slow down change and even out the peaks and valleys as administrations change.
I'd be worried about the Chesterton's Fence problem when removing bureaucracy simply because we don't like that it gets in our way.
Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone
#469The National Science Foundation funded the original research that became Google: https://www.nsf.gov/news/origins-google That grant in the area of library science led directly to one of the most valuable companies on the planet, creating far more value (2.2 trillion is today's market cap) from that one Digital Library Initiative grant to Stanford Professors Hector Garcia-Molina and Terry Winograd (plus a NSF Graduate…
In addition to Google...
DataBricks is a multibillion dollar company and was based on research at the AMPLab UC Berkeley, which was funded by an NSF Expeditions grant. https://amplab.cs.berkeley.edu/news/amp-awarded-10m-nsf-expe...
Duolingo is a multibillion dollar company and was based on NSF funded research. https://www.nsf.gov/science-matters/nsf-gave-duolingo-its-wi...
My previous startup, Wombat Security Technologies, was based on NSF funded research of just $1.2M. It led to over 200 jobs, and we helped protect millions of people around the world through our cybersecurity training.
I'm sure there are dozens of other startups that I don't know of also based on US Federal funding from NSF and NIH.
Strong science leads to a strong economy, and a strong economy is essential to national security.
We're also in an AI arms race with other countries around the world. Cutting science funding right now is a massive self-inflicted wound.
For everyone who is a US citizen, please write your Senators and House representatives pushing back against the chaos and the proposed science cuts. It only takes a few minutes, and the future of science in the US needs every bit of help it can get right now.
Re: Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone
#470Notwithstanding the other awful aspects of all of this, there’s a certain vibe of, “people who don’t understand how a system works attempting to act like they know how the system works and are too cowardly to admit they are breaking everything.” This just reads like “Character Limit” except replace Twitter with the federal government.
Sometimes the only way to know something is important is to shut it off and see if anyone complains. For example, lots of stories in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629714 . Now certainly the Trump administration could have been more careful, but they only have 4 years so the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.
Startups have nowhere to go but up. Large established companies have nowhere to go but down. Why do you think large organizations are so conservative? It's because getting new customers is much harder than losing existing customers. The US government has flaws, but it is phenomenal overall.
This is like taking over Apple and tearing apart its culture and management. Only bad will come out of it.