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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

#301

Post by intended »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #155
libraryatnight wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you work in industry? I do and the notion that all or most science will be coming from MBA driven decision making makes me want to throw up. Industry does the wrong thing for a higher return on a regular basis. That's not what I want driving science.

I worked for a decade at a major research university, and then couple decades in places devoid of MBA types, in the most obvious case because Steve Jobs wasn't into that, nor was the part of Motorola Labs or Sun etc where i was.

Theres firms that support research into debunking climate change.

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

#302

Post by intended »

jsbg wrote: post #178
kashunstva wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you think it's bleak that one's research now has to be profitable … ? The connection between new knowledge and profit is often indirect and cannot be clearly predicted beforehand. And, why must something be profitable in order to justify it? Are there no valid outcomes other than profit?

> why must something be profitable in order to justify it? Are there no valid outcomes other than profit? Because if it isn't profitable then it needs to be subsidized to continue. Given the replication crisis I don't think it's most people's priority to use part of their paycheck for this.

How do you think the replication crisis gets solved? By doing less science? Or by doing more replication?

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

#303

Post by mandmandam »

jsbg wrote: post #157
fzeroracer wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does research have to be profitable? There are many, many smaller diseases and cancers which affect a small subset of the population which will never be 'profitable', but it's important to research for the sake of scientific progress. I fundamentally do not understand how one can be so enthralled by capitalism that they believe we should not research anything unless a shareholder can generate a profit somewhere a…

> Why does research have to be profitable? Because it's the only way to get a job in industry. I find it repugnant that theoretical scientists feel entitled to some of my income.

Theoretical scientists made your income possible.

The algorithms behind modern finance, logistics, and computing stem from abstract mathematics.

Quantum mechanics laid the foundation for semiconductors, the internet, your smartphone etc.

Even GPS depends on Einstein’s general relativity, a theory once attacked for being too esoteric and detached from reality.

Do people not understand the concept of a long term investment, even if they can't grasp the importance of understanding for its own sake? What is it?

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

#304

Post by ben_w »

ethbr1 wrote: post #292
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

JumpCrisscross said "half century"; while I would doubt the "practically every" part of their claim and like you would instead reduce that to somewhere between "lots" and "most", your list has a lot of stuff from before 1975.

You can definitely have CD-ROMs and I think it's fair to give you DNA sequencing (though that's not really one single thing), but everything else is questionable or just not correct when I look up the history of those exact things on the same source you link to above — their own wikipedia pages.

As for "questionable":

- Cellular phone service: depends what you count as such, given people have been working on the predecessors to what's now called 1G since about the invention of the radio; but 1G itself would be Japan in 1979, so if that's your cut-off-point, then you could have it I guess.

- Laptop: only if you're counting the Portal R2E CCMC, because the first clamshell laptop was the Grid Compass. While the founder of the company and designer of the laptop were British, they were doing the work in the USA.

As for "just no":

- Basic oxygen steelmaking: 1856 for the first demonstration in the UK, 1940s for industrialisation in Austria

- Float glass: 1950s

- Orbital satellite: 1957

- High speed railway: depends what you mean by "high speed", but you could easily claim 1938 or several different points in the 1950s

- Public key cryptography: 1973 in secret in the UK, but they were classified for ages and only the US invention of the same a few years later made it commercially available, so the "lab" part in the lab-to-home path was definitely American.

- Orbital space station: 1971 (I'd count this as a paradigm shift even if there's no living rooms anywhere in sight here)

- Direct satellite television: why did you put this in your list? Not only is the first ever satellite TV broadcast the USA's Telstar in 1962, the first direct broadcast satellite was ATS-6 in 1974: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS-6

- Self-driving car: Even the SOTA in self driving cars is not "paradigm-shifting", so it's not really been invented yet at the level required to be on this list

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

#305

Post by hackyhacky »

hnburnsy wrote: post #294
hackyhacky wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 req…

A commitment to nondiscrimination is not "partisan", or at least it wasn't until the president made it so.

University professors are also required to accommodate students under the Americans with Disabilities Act. If the president finds that wheelchairs are a communist plot, does that make the ADA partisan?

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

#306

Post by hackyhacky »

hnburnsy wrote: post #293
hackyhacky wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

What does "beholden" mean? Does it mean the executive branch gets to install "viewpoint diversity" police and cancel whole departments, as they wanted to at Harvard? Do you think that level of government takeover benefits the university or the community?

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

#307

Post by ethbr1 »

hackyhacky wrote: post #305
hnburnsy wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 req…

A commitment to nondiscrimination is not "partisan", or at least it wasn't until the president made it so. University professors are also required to accommodate students under the Americans with Disabilities Act. If the president finds that wheelchairs are a communist plot, does that make the ADA partisan?

Hiring wasn't requiring candidates to make ADA statements, because it was the law.

And the command performances of DEI (the implementation) did get a little Kool Aid-y, even if diversity, equity, inclusion (the principles) are individually laudable.

But that's most things once they go through the HR washer.

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

#308

Post by hackyhacky »

ethbr1 wrote: post #307
hackyhacky wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A commitment to nondiscrimination is not "partisan", or at least it wasn't until the president made it so. University professors are also required to accommodate students under the Americans with Disabilities Act. If the president finds that wheelchairs are a communist plot, does that make the ADA partisan?

Hiring wasn't requiring candidates to make ADA statements, because it was the law. And the command performances of DEI (the implementation) did get a little Kool Aid-y, even if diversity, equity, inclusion (the principles) are individually laudable. But that's most things once they go through the HR washer.

Nondiscrimination is also the law .

See Title 6, Title 9 of course the Civil Rights Act

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

#309

Post by colpabar »

hackyhacky wrote: post #308
ethbr1 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring wasn't requiring candidates to make ADA statements, because it was the law. And the command performances of DEI (the implementation) did get a little Kool Aid-y, even if diversity, equity, inclusion (the principles) are individually laudable. But that's most things once they go through the HR washer.

Nondiscrimination is also the law . See Title 6, Title 9 of course the Civil Rights Act

Do you see how you're doing the "even if that is happening, which it isn't, it's actually a good thing" thing?

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

#310

Post by pbhjpbhj »

vessenes wrote: post #127
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Considered most charitably, the current administration sees itself as trying to return to an era of imperialism for the good of the country. I mean there's charitable interpretation, then there's being an emu and pretending that the transfer of massive wealth to Trump and his cronies through stock market manipulation (after removing checks on said manipulation, apparently) isn't just wide scale theft. $3.4B to only…

Oh it's clearly a kleptocracy at the top, don't get me wrong. You can have both.

There imperialism, sure, but the "for the good of the country" is very clearly not true.
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