Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation

Not only is that losing the engagement economy, but onlookers to the thread are far more likely to read and latch onto the smaller soundbites. Longer replies also give critics more gristle to latch onto - you may think a long post covers all its bases, but you're really just giving people more avenues of rebuttable.

Better to be succinct, and if important context is left out, respond to it as concerns are raised.

Nicely put, but I say ignorance because your post was a flurry of questions asking someone else to tell you information about multiple subjects rather than adding substantive information or viewpoint to the conversation.

> Not an argument that these advances would not have been made otherwise, such as by research directly in medical imaging, nor an argument that this was the cheapest way we could have made these advances.

You've asked a question that is impossible to answer, but the reality is that the benefit happened, and it's not the only one. It seems that the system has some merit, although yes, there's no way to prove that there wasn't a "better" straight-line-to-the-answer way to do it. How can you know the straight-line path ahead of time? You can't map the territory without going out there and looking. Basic research in multiple areas, allowing for cross-pollination has done a really good job at that over the years.

> Ditto for mathematics, which for centuries has progressed without direct public funding.

This one really doesn't make sense. Who paid Riemann? Who paid Newton? Universities are not a new thing, and funding them with state money has been there from the start. Even figures perhaps not as strongly associated with universities like John Herschel or Tycho Brahe got their money from the state one way or the other (aristocrats, or given money to advance the knowledge and/or image of the state).

And immediately before that, they (Americans, British, French, Japanese (!)) had invaded Russia to provide support to tsarist and proto-fascist elements that were running around committing pogroms, killing anybody not immediately prostrating themselves to their "saviors", and trying to crush the revolution.

> The keenest Interventionists were equally appalled, regarding the offer of talks [with the Soviet government] as tantamount to diplomatic recognition. From Vladivostok, General Knox sent a 'really fuming' telegram - the proposal put 'brave men...fighting for civilisation' on a par with 'the blood-stained, Jew-led Bolsheviks' - and in Archangel, American consul DeWitt Poole threatened to resign. Happening to be in Paris, Chruchill burst in on Lloyd George while he was shaving, and thundered that if one were going to recognize the regime, 'one might as well legalise sodomy.' Churchill and Foch both also privately assured White contacts that even if they rejected talks, military aid would keep flowing. The Prinkipo proposal thus died at birth.

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> It is true that the worst violence happened off-stage, in small towns away from the bases where British personnel spent most of their time. But this was not always so, and there was more than enough opportunity to find out what was happening from Jewish relief organisations, or from survivors who had fled to the cities. Typical of the way the British preferred to turn a blind eye was embedded journalist Hodgson, who tied himself in knots criticising the Volunteer Army's obsessive antisemitism ('a fierce and unreasoning hatred'), while simultaneously denying that it had committed any pogroms. He dismissed a Jewish committee's protest to British command at Constantinople as an 'effusion', and on a tour of newly captured towns claimed not to have found 'a sign or whisper of outrage'. On the contrary, he possessed 'the strongest evidence' that Denikin's orders against pogroms were being 'conscientiously observed', and 'every effort' being made, 'with great success, to prevent unnecessary bloodshed.' As for past pogroms, the were 'grossly exaggerated', and had mostly been 'fanned into existence by the nervous panicking of the Jews themselves.'

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> For the civilian population,. perhaps harshest of the winter's brutalities was the burning of front-line villages. Both sides did it, but rattled, out-of-their-depth Allied troops - ready to see a collaborator in every uncommunicative local - especially so. In early January a false alarm panicked American units into completely destroying the Vaga village of Kitsa, and Scheu describes putting part of disputed Tulgas to the torch:

>> We throw a cordon of troops around the village to prevent interference, notify natives, and set fire to village at 9 p.m. It ignites rapidly, lighting up surrounding country. Have difficulty with natives; we gave them 3 hours notice to pack and vacate. 'Twas a sad sight.

> The next day the cottages were still smoking, 'a big black smudge upon the snow.'

from Reid - A Nasty Little War