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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

#291

Post by ethbr1 »

hackyhacky wrote: post #290
ethbr1 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a liberal monoculture in American universities ~2000-2023. Said as a liberal. Litmus test: Say something incendiary in a liberal direction at a university and observe reaction (i.e. "there is no such thing as biological gender"). Say something incendiary in a conservative direction and observe reaction (i.e. "life begins at conception and abortion is murder"). There absolutely was a double-standard. That sa…

> There was a liberal monoculture in American universities ~2000-2023. The fact that there are a large number of liberals at universities does not make it a monoculture. There is no conspiracy to keep non-liberals out. Your anecdote shows nothing.

The affiliations of employees and students (if liberal) isn't what creates a monoculture -- it's the double standard and resulting self-censorship.

Too few liberals in academia were willing to say "I disagree with what you say, but support your right to say it" when it was inconvenient.

Which isn't in any way to justify the excessive clusterfuck of a reprise by populist conservatives these days. Two wrongs do not make a right, and what's being done today is much worse than the liberal bent of early 21st century US universities.

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

#292

Post by ethbr1 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #286
ethbr1 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of things: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_inventi... Still, the statement that a large (but not all) portion of them were American inventions is probably defensible. On the other hand, the American economy was one of the few major ones unravaged by WWII conflict.

I’m talking about paradigm-shifting conventions. Microprocessors. LLMs. The Internet. Lithium-ion batteries. Our institutions reliably did the basic research to bias us (and the USSR) towards discovering their underlying phenomena and then maturing that into technology. Today, the only real player in that space is China.

> paradigm-shifting conventions

   - Basic oxygen steelmaking
   - Float glass
   - Orbital satellite
   - High speed railway
   - Public key cryptography
   - Orbital space station
   - DNA/RNA/sequencing
   - Self-driving car
   - Cellular phone service
   - CD-ROM
   - Direct satellite television
   - Laptop
   - (Also some other stuff after 1985...)
Take many and don't be a dick about most.

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

#293

Post by hnburnsy »

hackyhacky wrote: post #218
AlexandrB wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm increasingly sympathetic to the perspective that universities cannot both exclude any questioning of their ideological leaning while also expecting republican administrations and voters to continue funding them. I've seen this best expressed here: https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-beatings-will-conti... It's one thing to want public funding, but it's quite another to want that funding while expecting naked…

> I'm increasingly sympathetic to the perspective that universities cannot both exclude any questioning of their ideological leaning Well, they don't do that. The myth that universities are liberal monocultures is propagated by the right as an excuse to attack them. Let's turn your argument around: most police departments employee conservative voters. Would you be comfortable with the government requiring "viewpoint…

>Universities are, and should be, free to choose their own values and hiring practice.

If you are going to take in millions in Pell grants, student loans, and research funding, you are going to be beholden to politics. There are many that decline the funding to retain their independence.

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

#294

Post by hnburnsy »

hackyhacky wrote: post #290
ethbr1 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a liberal monoculture in American universities ~2000-2023. Said as a liberal. Litmus test: Say something incendiary in a liberal direction at a university and observe reaction (i.e. "there is no such thing as biological gender"). Say something incendiary in a conservative direction and observe reaction (i.e. "life begins at conception and abortion is murder"). There absolutely was a double-standard. That sa…

> There was a liberal monoculture in American universities ~2000-2023. The fact that there are a large number of liberals at universities does not make it a monoculture. There is no conspiracy to keep non-liberals out. Your anecdote shows nothing.

A Quantitative Study of DEI Statements in American University Job Listings

>Job applicants should not be required as a condition of employment to profess their loyalty to partisan statements or beliefs. Yet universities that solicit statements of commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion from job applicants do precisely that.

...

>We have discovered that 86 out of the 98 American universities we investigated required diversity statements for at least some job positions.

https://www.nas.org/reports/ideological-insistence/full-repo...

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

#295

Post by thisisit »

jsbg wrote: post #196
thisisit wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you think it's bleak that one's research now has to be profitable rather than being subsidized by people paying taxes? I honestly don't understand why people don't get this - Government is not supposed to be "profitable". The whole reason to collect taxes is for good of the society. It sounds like your view is that rural towns, which are already in crisis, should be left to rot away because it isn't "profitable". T…

> The whole reason to collect taxes is for good of the society. There are infinitely many things that are marginally good for society and finitely many resources to accomplish them. Spending on irreplicable research has an opportunity cost that most taxpayers wouldn’t choose. Framing it as empathy to forcibly take their income and subsidize lofty science is ironic.

>most taxpayers wouldn’t choose

How do you know that? Tax paying is a larger subset of people who voted in this election because migrants also pay taxes. The popular vote count was 49.8%. So, however you want to dice it "most taxpayers" aren't choosing here.

> forcibly take their income and subsidize lofty science is ironic

Forcibly take? That is a right-wing point you seem to be repeating without seeing the irony.

The whole point of electing a government is that it can allocate taxpayers money maybe to causes you don't agree with.

If government reallocating resources is "forcibly take" then "most taxpayers" - the 50.8% people who didn't vote for this government can also claim their taxes are being "forcibly taken" by this government as well? Or is it that right wing voices matter more than others?

As I said lack of empathy and callousness is a hallmark of this government and its supporters.

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

#296

Post by citadel_melon »

jmalicki wrote: post #231
whatshisface wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Bell Laboratories has been the recipient of 11 Nobel Prizes in Physics, with notable laureates including John Bardeen, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and Arthur Ashkin. Other notable achievements include the invention of the transistor, the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, and the development of optical tweezers." Microsoft Research has a ton of people working on theoretical CS. Biology - there is a…

Bell Labs was at its peak from 1960s-1970s. Since the 80s, corporate governance has completely changed due to Jack Welch’s short-term shareholder maximization ideology taking over the corporate world.

I don’t think there are current private organizations doing research similar to what Bell Labs did as the current corporate-governance systems wouldn’t allow for it.

Currently, industry research is more for profit-maximization at the expense of greater human prosperity/economic growth: such as you mention Monsanto making patented seeds, increasing profits by disallowing farmers to regrow crops more cheaply which otherwise could’ve been passed onto consumers/wider society.

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

#297

Post by const_cast »

nailer wrote: post #289
const_cast wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what DEI is. You might be referring to Affirmative action.

I am referring to AA, but AA is considered part of DEI at most organisations.

No, AA is not considered part of DEI at any organizations. AA has been dead for decades now.

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

#298

Post by intended »

AlexandrB wrote: post #41
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…

I'm increasingly sympathetic to the perspective that universities cannot both exclude any questioning of their ideological leaning while also expecting republican administrations and voters to continue funding them. I've seen this best expressed here: https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-beatings-will-conti... It's one thing to want public funding, but it's quite another to want that funding while expecting naked…

I am not sympathetic to this, simply because it is a long standing weapon to attack education.

If you believe, truly, in the market place of ideas, then the question is why you dont have wildly successful conservative universities springing up, to take advantage of the inefficiency this so called purity testing is taking up.

If professors are going to leave the country whole sale, thats a pretty clear sign of preferences which can’t be faked.

——

A point I raise on the DEI angle. We are at a stage where, with better ways to allocate resources, humanity could become (or be on its way to) a post scarcity species. This used to be the dream.

The question is how we spend our time. Part of that journey is the existence of role models from communities where there is a low diversity of examples of careers to take one through life.

DEI doesn’t mean that this is anti-majority. I’ve heard this particular assault in more than one country now. Fundamentally, the issue is never DEI.

The issue, stripping past the politics, is always resource distribution, AKA jobs.

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

#299

Post by intended »

jmalicki wrote: post #231
whatshisface wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Bell Laboratories has been the recipient of 11 Nobel Prizes in Physics, with notable laureates including John Bardeen, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and Arthur Ashkin. Other notable achievements include the invention of the transistor, the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, and the development of optical tweezers." Microsoft Research has a ton of people working on theoretical CS. Biology - there is a…

There is tons of research on online safety being done at platforms.

It can never be released.

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

#300

Post by intended »

Symmetry wrote: post #165
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.

Bell labs was funded from the profits of a legal monopoly, and the money spent on it was used to justify the continuance of that monopoly. You do see some private basic research these days as with Google in robotics or Microsoft in quantum computers but its fairly rare and small compared to government funded research. And pharma companies do a lot of research but it's almost entirely applied, taking the basic process…

Bell labs also took in and benefitted from, the larger tapestry of experts and scientists that were attracted by the US education and research machine.
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