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Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation

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Re: Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation

#141

Post by kacesensitive »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #68
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #10

Evidently the president appointed one of his personal attorneys to be the new librarian of Congress. The library turned him away because Congress hasn't approved him. It seems it's becoming more of a clusterfuck just about every day.

Not that different than the author of this article. Is she a neutral scientist acting in the best interest of science? No, she is a Biden political appointee: Nelson was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Is she even a highly qualified? She has a Ph.D., but in what? Nelson earned a Bachelor of Science…

Oh no, not a Ph.D. from NYU and a science policy leadership role under a president—how scandalous! Imagine thinking someone who specializes in the intersection of science, society, and governance might be... qualified to advise on science and society. Her research literally focuses on how science and technology shape—and are shaped by—social forces. But sure, let’s pretend like policy isn't supposed to involve people who understand, you know, people.

Re: Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation

#142

Post by AlexandrB »

User23 wrote: post #76

Scientists commit to politics. Election happens. Election has consequences. Shocker. To be fair conservatives warned about this for decades but nobody listened. The only possible response to this propaganda piece are nodding along religiously or revulsion and disgust at the sheer intellectual dishonesty of it. This kind of superficial performative nonsense is a big part of why the replication crisis is as bad as it i…

It's pretty depressing watching comments here that say anything other than "this is the worst thing ever" or "this is fascism" get downvoted/flagged into oblivion.

Re: Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation

#143

Post by vessenes »

mistrial9 wrote: post #5
vessenes wrote: post #3

Good read; too long to sway public opinion though. The most convincing and interesting thing I’ve read about the US’s science standing is just a reminder that it wasn’t always considered a global science leader. A few people saw the opportunity created by Nazi ideological purges of scientists and built, among other things, Princeton’s IAS. Considered most charitably, the current administration sees itself as trying t…

respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself. secondly, sitting in California, this repeated cool-kid refs to Nazis is just more knee-jerk polarization. Serious topics are at hand. Excess and overly-optimistic polarizing rhetoric with smug bank accounts are a root cause of this recent extreme swing in Federal powers. IMHO

I'd say the swing in Federal powers comes from the real income dropping for most Americans over the last 30 years. Nobody wants to be told "this is great!" when it is not. Especially when it's "Macroeconomists say this is great!".

Bread and circuses -- the prior administrations, regardless of political camp, have delivered neither the circus nor the bread. People want to try something else.

That's in my opinion totally orthogonal to the aims of those digging in Federally right now; those aims are fairly diverse in my opinion, if themed.

Re: Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation

#144

Post by vunderba »

jsbg wrote: post #92
Onawa wrote: post #25

As a federal contractor within NIH, I can tell you that the damage has already been done to the United States' dominance in science. Even if every action taken by current administration is reversed, the uncertainty for foreign scientists is too much. Many that I have spoken to are looking for their exit from either gov or academic research, or looking to leave the United States completely. The Trump admins cuts are n…

> realize that you will most likely end up in industry. > Things are quite bleak right now... you think it's bleak that one's research now has to be profitable rather than being subsidized by people paying taxes?

Didn't the space race help usher in consumer technology such as CAT scanners, GPS, digital imaging, etc.?

Re: Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation

#145

Post by ahmeneeroe-v2 »

mystraline wrote: post #118
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's not a clustefuck" ... proceeds to describe a clusterfuck ... What was your intention here?

A clusterfuck us usually no real plan, and everyone deciding on their own, causing chaos. No, what we are seeing is a coup. The USA has exhausted in causing coups in other parts of the world. Now, we are in a coup caused by the USA government. The executive branch is captured. The courts are captured. Most of Congress is captured. Those left over whinge about 'illegal' and basically send out more emails for more dona…

>the exec, the courts, and a majority of congress

I genuinely don't understand how this can be a coup when all three branches agree. I mean sure, we are well outside the strict scope of Constitution, but that ship left generations ago.

Re: Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation

#146

Post by naasking »

whatshisface wrote: post #104
jjtheblunt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bell Labs is a counterexample that ran for decades, and pharma companies have internal research labs, I know Motorola and Apple have, too. In my experience, industry can be vastly better funded, but the industry labs are internal and perhaps very hard to find.

Here is an incomplete list of things that it's impossible to research in industry: 1. Astronomy. 2. Physics. 3. Geophysics concerning the parts of the Earth deeper than the crust. 4. Biology aside from medicine. 5. Chemistry aside from industrial chemistry. 6. Theoretical computer science. 7. Mathematics. I'm not blaming you for not knowing this, but I am holding my head in my hands - how can people not know about as…

> Astronomy.

What benefits do you expect to see from the kinds astronomy that require this sort of funding? Sure, knowing things can be nice but this ignores opportunity costs, eg. would practical knowledge like fusion research be further along if talent weren't focused on impractical knowledge?

> Physics.

Not strictly true, see quantum computing for instance, lasers, semiconductors and so on. There are some types of physics that aren't viable in this sense, but why does that automatically translate into some need to support them? For instance, consider the decades spent on supersymmetry which ultimately produced bupkis. In a world in which we weren't so focused on ideas so divorced from empirical data, what other types of knowledge or engineering would we have done?

> Geophysics concerning the parts of the Earth deeper than the crust.

What benefits do you expect to see?

> Biology aside from medicine.

Such as? What benefits do you expect to see?

> Chemistry aside from industrial chemistry.

Such as? What benefits do you expect to see?

> Theoretical computer science.

Untrue, Google and Facebook have advance distributed computing considerably, for instance.

> Mathematics.

Unclear, there's a lot of math involved in predictions of all sorts, like weather forecasting, stock market prediction. If your argument here is that math will be more application-focused, this strikes me much like the physics objection where it's unclear that we'd really be worse off.

There seems to be this automatic assumption among some people that pure research with no direction or constraints is an unmitigated good and that we can't do better. I used to think so too, but I just don't see it anymore.

Re: Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation

#147

Post by ijk »

robinsoncrusue wrote: post #125
ijk wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than, say, the GPS on your phone, the internet that you're posting on, or anything like that--you want to know what government-funded basic science has done to benefit you lately, not any of these decade-long timeline projects that are best funded by institutions with long time horizons, such as governments. Yes, we must have results that are brought to market this quarter, so the government-funded research jus…

If my memory serves me correctly, the ones you mentioned were DARPA projects. Which is defense arm - and AFAIK defense budget is not being cut. I am not against government spending for dominance but I am just simply asking a question when the deficit spending is high and soon the line item for interest expense is greater than the defense budget, is dominance still more of a concern than say, I don't know, Govt unable…

Given that the article we're discussing explicitly mentions the NSF contribution to those projects and links to articles going into great depth about the details, including NSFNET, I'm going to assume you're working off prior assumptions.

Of course, in modern monetary theory GDP growth is one of the major factors keeping sovereign debt manageable [1], and NSF funding of about $9B [2] is about 0.2% of the national budget, and that money that is invested in basic research is generally found to significantly contribute to that economic growth [3], there are few ways I can think of to make the debt situation worse than to cut basic research.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt-to-GDP_ratio

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation

[3] https://www.sfn.org/-/media/SfN/Documents/NEW-SfN/Advocacy/2...

Re: Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation

#148

Post by jjtheblunt »

whatshisface wrote: post #104
jjtheblunt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bell Labs is a counterexample that ran for decades, and pharma companies have internal research labs, I know Motorola and Apple have, too. In my experience, industry can be vastly better funded, but the industry labs are internal and perhaps very hard to find.

Here is an incomplete list of things that it's impossible to research in industry: 1. Astronomy. 2. Physics. 3. Geophysics concerning the parts of the Earth deeper than the crust. 4. Biology aside from medicine. 5. Chemistry aside from industrial chemistry. 6. Theoretical computer science. 7. Mathematics. I'm not blaming you for not knowing this, but I am holding my head in my hands - how can people not know about as…

Apple definitely had an internal group doing mathematics research, which i know first hand. But yes there are, to your point, topics in science probably only done in academia etc, but, to my point, several are seriously funded in industry.

Re: Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation

#149

Post by lupusreal »

kmeisthax wrote: post #100
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> too long to sway public opinion Our founders were aware of the perils of letting public opinion write public policy. We’ve spent a lot of the post-Cold War era dismantling that anti-populist infrastructure. To the extent I see a guiding light out of this mess, it’s in reducing the electoral fetishism that has dominated post-90s democratic discourse. There is more to democracy (and more pointedly, republics) than po…

You're broadly right, but I would argue that the "anti-populist infrastructure" is specifically responsible for electoral fetishism. The thing to remember is that in the 1950s and 60s the US government was basically running a censorship regime and had manufactured an anti-Communist consensus. They had to do this because democratic politics back then meant political parties actually listening to their constituents. In…

> The thing to remember is that in the 1950s and 60s the US government was basically running a censorship regime and had manufactured an anti-Communist consensus.

I think it's worth remembering where that came from. Before the war, in the 20s and 30s, the American industrial establishment was quite happy to work with the Soviet Union, both in selling equipment and lending technical expertise to help the Soviet Union set up their own production (for instance, Ford helped them set up GAZ). The ideological incompatibility of the Soviet Union and western capitalism wasn't seen as so much of a problem, it was mutually profitable to be civil and do business with each other.

Genuine concern with the Soviet Union grew during the war when it became difficult to ignore the belligerent nature of the Soviet Union, towards their neighbors and their own people.

Re: Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation

#150

Post by searine »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #130
voxl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I watched 15 years of Alzheimer's research shut down by NSF and NIH because they refused to touch anything but Amyloid beta. the idea that they are bastions of open mindedness, ethics, or efficiency seems laughable to me.

The important point here is that science corrected itself. It saw a lack of progress from a direction of inquiry and using its established mechanisms rerouted that inquiry.

To expect that every effort will succeed and be perfect is just naive. What matters is that the system has a mechanism to self-evaluate its results and change the consensus. Which it did. Which means it works. We means we shouldn't burn it down.

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