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U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

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Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#181
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Giving up is not a strategy. Nor is it what I advocated. > Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity That's usually true, but it's not the main problem. The main problem is that the regulations don't actually regulate, in the sense they need to. All they do is entrench the incumbent corporations that paid good money for them, by making it harder for competitors to enter their marke…

> > allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane. > humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years You really can't compare pre and post industrial revolution like that. Large scale synthesis of toxic chemicals as a byproduct of some unrelated industry just wasn't a thing previously. > In a free market, such an aircraft manufacturer…

> I don't think the free market would have selected for the current cost vs safety balance on its own.

Possibly not. Possibly in a free market people still would fly on an aircraft type that was known to have had two recent crashes that killed everyone on board. I wouldn't, but perhaps I'm an outlier.

But if people would be willing to fly on such an aircraft in a free market (which means that the value of flying on it, to them, is greater than the cost, even including the expected cost of the risk of a fatal crash), then the logical consequence is not that our air travel regulations are doing good; it's that our air travel regulations are overestimating (possibly drastically) the value we actually put on human life, and therefore are diverting large amounts of resources to things that actually are worth less to us than they cost. That's not a net benefit.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it really feels like I'm grieving a death. Jimmy Carter's funeral a few days before Trump was inaugurated really felt like the funeral for America. The moral gulf between Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump is just so vast. To imagine that the US elected someone with the integrity of Jimmy Carter in 1976... and then elected someone who is as morally bankrupt as Trump is in 2024. > there is simply no coming back from the…

But why was Carter elected? Partly it was disgust at Watergate. Could we see someone of integrity elected as a result of a backlash of disgust at Trump? Yes, we could. Will the Democrats run such a person? I don't have much hope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_United_States_presidentia...

Carter won basically because Ford pardoned Nixon.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles. I think you are right. At the same time it’s also an opportunity to get rid of an outdated constitution and have another go, with the benefit of 250 more years of experience. Just don’t fall into complacency: this gov…

I don't think they can get rid of the constitution. It would require a near total control of all judges right now and I don't think they have that. What they will instead do is continually test the boundaries and shift them. They will also put in loyalists. Aka corruption. This already happened in the army by the way. It's fascinating to see how a democracy is turned into a dictatorship.

Happened before, for example in Germany. Not sure "fascinating" is the word I'd choose.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#184
If LLMs really can act as invetors why US should export its research for free? The return will be 0.

Today the rationale for open research is that openness accelerates it. What if you just need more electricity and silicon to accelerate it?

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#185
post #125
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Indeed, I’m not sure what compels people to compare real regulatory systems from now or history to some imaginary free market where producers always act in their long-term interest and consumers always have perfect information. Every functioning society on earth regulates food drugs and infrastructure. We lived through the unregulated version for centuries, and it took mountains of dead children and poisoned workers…

> We lived through the unregulated version for centuries

In the sense that we didn't have, say, the FDA, yes, that's true. But that doesn't mean food production, for example, was unregulated. It means it was regulated by the voluntary choices of people producing and consuming food. That system did not produce "mountains of dead children and poisoned workers". Those things happened after food production became a mass industry, not before.

There was a difference, before food production became a mass industry: most people knew the people who were producing their food, personally. That does change the incentives involved. One could make a case that, now that food production is a mass industry, and people don't for the most part know personally anyone who is involved with producing their food, we need regulations that we didn't need before. But that's a different argument than the one you're making.

One could also make a case the opposite way, that governments already had the tools in place to regulate food production as a mass industry--for example, by stopping large food corporations from using mafia-like methods to bully their supply chains--and failed to use them, which resulted in a bigger government--the Federal government--stepping in and stomping on them. And that the result of that, now, as I pointed out in another post elsewhere in this thread, has not been "safe food" that we didn't have before: we have meat full of antibiotics, vegetables full of pesticides, ethanol from corn in our gasoline while other food crops are crowded out, etc.

> The answer is to design better institutions

That effort has been going on for millennia. As Dr. Phil likes to say, how's that workin' out for ya?

Or, if you want another common saying, isn't the standard definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results this time?

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#186

Are we purposefully dumbing down the country now? Sure, some things are trade-secrets or national security issues or whatnot, but those are already not shared. More than militarily the US has always led with soft-power (science, culture, etc). We are throwing all this soft-power away. Perhaps there is a legitimate reason, but like so many things in this administration this feels like a knee-jerk reaction to... Someth…

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Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Russian people? Anyway, I wonder what comes after the USAA.

As a Russian national: no, the USA is not yet at nearly the same level of corruption. The main bulwark against Russianification is not the Congress or the SCOTUS, it's the true federative nature of the US. States have a lot of very real autonomy and they limit the amount of corrupt overreach.

Watching their effectiveness against Google closely.

As are many, I’m sure.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#189
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just did a 30 year run of “religious people are dumb and holding bus back” and it didn’t start a science boom and just made people more unhappy and disaffected. And 2020 further revealed that science is not immune from politics or its own religious ideals.

Do you imply that last 30 years lacked significant science progress? Even if I ignore the tech ones (simpler to associate with the US), there were quite some impressive progress I heard of in other fields (in which US was significantly involved).

No, but most certainly less than 1940-1970 which was a much more religious time.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#190
post #2

This could be understandable if some rationale was provided, but it's worse than that: > Neither agency has publicly issued new formal guidance describing these requirements. Instead, officials are informing grantees individually, leaving researchers confused and concerned. They've not even made it official. They're just randomly flagging.

The article mentions, oddly enough at literally the very bottom, that one of the main laws being used is the 'Wolf Amendment' [1], passed in 2011. It's what prevented Chinese from working on the ISS and arguably is why China now has its own space station. It's an extremely dumb law that's been passed and reauthorized repeatedly by every single administration and Congress since Obama who it was passed under. Just quot…

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