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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

#321

Post by int_19h »

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 monoculture does not require some kind of conspiracy or even concerted efforts to maintain it. Simple dominance by numbers is sufficient, and that is very much observably the case based on numerous polls of political leanings.

FWIW I'm not even saying that it's necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. As far as I'm concerned, a lot of it is due to conservatives increasingly drifting away from major positions that can be sustained through facts and reason (although the same effect also exists on the other side of the aisle, I'd say it's less pronounced overall).

But that doesn't matter. OP's point is, if science falls squarely on one side of political spectrum, for any reason, the consequences shouldn't be surprising.

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

#324

Post by naasking »

conn10mfan wrote: post #312
naasking wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

wild to come across people on HN who are skeptical about the value of knowing things "holding my head in my hands" to quote an earlier poster

Wild to come across people on HN who don't seem to understand that "knowing things" has a price tag, that there is no such thing as "no price is too high", that science that can economically justify itself shouldn't be publicly funded and that science that must be publicly funded should have to justify itself to tax payers.

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

#325

Post by apercu »

jslaby wrote: post #123
apercu wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"effectively gutting the least efficient parts of the government (my take, at least from 50,000 view)" Based on what? See, I think of myself as a highly informed, curious person that is a voracious reader and yet I absolutely know I have zero basis to make such a determination. So what data do you have that I don't?

Efficiency is at an all time high now. We can see one air traffic controller handling a workload that would have required ten or more.

Lol, that's quite the example using recent history.

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

#326

Post by naasking »

whatshisface wrote: post #171
naasking wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Each of these has a long answer, so I'll pick this one: > [Chemistry]? Such as? What benefits do you expect to see? Everything around us is made up of "molecules," assemblages of parts called atoms. Since it's not possible to manipulate the molecules directly in sufficient numbers (one pound of plastic is made of 2000000000000000000000 individual molecules), we have to assemble molecules en masse by subjecting them t…

All well and good, but not an argument that the science here has to be publicly funded, and that a commercial research enterprise providing this library is not viable. The question was about what benefits come from the public funding, in particular, benefits that simply cannot be provided by a commercial enterprise or alternative approaches. You merely stated this was the case and I'm asking for the reasons.

Even supposing the costs associated with basic research can't be recouped commercially using existing technology, that does not suggest that alternatives are not possible. For instance, in a world in which this library was not created, perhaps the set of talented industrial chemists in our timeline would have studied physics or computer science instead and advanced quantum chemistry simulations that capture some, most or even all of the utility of this empirical approach.

I can look at what you describe and acknowledge that it's useful without automatically accepting that it's a) not commercializable, and b) impossible to work around, which is what you were implying.

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

#327

Post by naasking »

const_cast wrote: post #275
naasking wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> What benefits do you expect to see? This is exactly the problem: you're describing a for-profit mindset, and it's exactly why research in the private sector floundering. If you pretense everything with "what value will this bring" then you've already lost. Research is about finding things out for the sake of it. You don't know if it brings value because you haven't researched it yet. That's what breaking new ground…

> If you pretense everything with "what value will this bring" then you've already lost. Research is about finding things out for the sake of it.

No, it's not. If research never brought any value then we would almost never do it, aside from some weird hobbyists, and particularly not with public funds. Everything has a cost-benefit tradeoff, even publicly funded research, and pretending this isn't so is naive at best.

Research whose costs can be recouped on short time horizons arguably should not have public funding because the economic incentives are sufficient. Exactly where to draw this line is not clear, not only because research returns are unclear but also because publicly funded research diverts talented people from endeavours that would have provided direct economic benefits. This second order effect is not widely appreciated. How can you truly evaluate the opportunity cost of this counterfactual world? Seems virtually impossible in fact, so arguments that research X returns Y with no consideration that you can't evaluate the counterfactual should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

And this doesn't even get into the problem of scope creep. Academics charged with pure research develop the exact mindset you illustrate, where no matter how outlandish the idea, well maybe it will be good for something someday, so why not fund it just in case? This ends up producing a whole lot of nothing, as we've seen in particle physics over the past 30+ years.

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

#328

Post by naasking »

elashri wrote: post #313
naasking wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> well at least astronomy is a convenient cover for military/intelligence interests funding better optics Right, defense can and has funded research for its own purposes, and sometimes those purposes can find wider commercial application (like the internet). That's all great, national defense is one of the government's primary purposes. > There are huge parts of physics which are only publicly funded. Yes, and? Is th…

> For instance, the newest super collider project that some people are pushing for completely misses the opportunity cost of not funding other projects that could be far more impactful, like wakefield accelerators, which would reduce the size and cost of particle accelerators by orders of magnitude. This is not true in many aspects. There are many problems with plasma and laser wakefield acceleration. First, the beam…

> But on the other hand, we have "FCC" being based on mature accelerator technologies, with well-understood cost scaling and detector integration that builds on decades on experience building accelerators. Actually it is much safer option than what you are saying.

The question is not whether wakefield accelerators are "ready" for something on the scale of a supercollider, the question is what is the expected return per dollar spend? From what I can see, there's very, very little we can expect from the energy levels achieved by the next radio frequency supercollider. It's basically "explore the Higgs sector a little better", and that's it, and we're not expecting to find much there. $20B is a high price tag for producing basically nothing new.

I'm saying that if you took $18B of $20B for the supercollider they've been tossing about and invest it into wakefield research, it's very plausible that we could solve all of the problems you describe, and with the $2B left over we could build a wakefield accelerator of comparable energy, and that we'd be better off in that world.

> But the important point is that you are making it binary choice, we can still investigate and work on wakefield accelerators while working on more mature projects.

Investment dollars are finite, therefore it often is a binary choice. You could fund tens of thousands of smaller experiments in domains where we have actual uncertainty for the cost of this one piece of equipment that's good for only a few experiments.

> Also I would say that Scientific value isn’t measured by compactness or cost alone. This is a VC mindset not a scientist pushing boundaries of knowledge.

If you want to expand knowledge faster then you should consider adopting the VC mindset: reduce costs per novel datum gathered. You can run more experiments in more diverse fields and uncover more surprises. Sounds like something a scientist should value frankly.

> I know it is a cliche by now and many people HN doesn't like to be reminded about that but guess that is the most beneficial CERN output ?

Direct military projects arguably haven't been a focus of CERN for 30+ years. They might benefit indirectly, but ask yourself whether the military would have still achieved the outcomes they needed by funding that research directly rather than indirectly in a way that accidentally produced things they needed. The direct funding is what I'm suggesting is well justified, the indirect maybe not so much.

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

#329

Post by ethbr1 »

hackyhacky wrote: post #320
ethbr1 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performative : made or done for show (as to bolster one's own image or make a positive impression on others) It's hard to parse how they were used any other way. https://web.archive.org/web/20250403173227/https://edib.harv... https://www.thecrimson.com/column/council-on-academic-freedo... https://www.thecrimson.com/column/council-on-academic-freedo... Both of the writers seem to believe that DEI statements, as implem…

> It's hard to parse how they were used any other way. No, it's pretty easy. They were used to comply with the law. > Both of the writers seem to believe that DEI statements, as implemented at Harvard, were mildly to wildly partisan. Do you know what partisan means? It means favoring a particular political party. The attempt to cast perfectly normal rules against discrimination as a partisan project is one of the mor…

You managed to write three full paragraphs that didn't respond to what I wrote.

If you want to monologue, that's fine, but I thought we were having a conversation.

One of the greatest travesties of our modern times is that political conversation somehow robs people of the capacity to read and listen, because another person being wrong seemingly trumps any requirement for either.

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

#330

Post by hackyhacky »

ethbr1 wrote: post #329
hackyhacky wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard to parse how they were used any other way. No, it's pretty easy. They were used to comply with the law. > Both of the writers seem to believe that DEI statements, as implemented at Harvard, were mildly to wildly partisan. Do you know what partisan means? It means favoring a particular political party. The attempt to cast perfectly normal rules against discrimination as a partisan project is one of the mor…

You managed to write three full paragraphs that didn't respond to what I wrote. If you want to monologue, that's fine, but I thought we were having a conversation. One of the greatest travesties of our modern times is that political conversation somehow robs people of the capacity to read and listen, because another person being wrong seemingly trumps any requirement for either.

> One of the greatest travesties of our modern times is that political conversation somehow robs people of the capacity to read and listen, because another person being wrong seemingly trumps any requirement for either.

This is a criticism that you should take to heart. I addressed your previous comment: you said that DEI is performative, and I explained how it wasn't; and you said that DEI is partisan, and I explained how it wasn't. Are you able to read and listen, or are these virtues that you love to extoll only when it suits you?

Or you could take the lazy way out.

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