US loss, Europe's win. Same thing with the trade wars and other Trumpian policies. Short term gains to look strong but long term just degrades US soft power and decades of ally building.
What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
101–110 of 1001 posts
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the former is most likely. The people are largely unhappy with how things have been and it's unlikely to get materially worse for the majority of people in the near term, so I don't think there will be a fire lit under enough of the population to rise up. If it gets bad enough that most people are starving, rather then just struggling, we'll see action, but I doubt it'll get there anytime soon.
>The people are largely unhappy with how things have been This is an understatement to say the least, and the fact it's been denied and even refused by the powers that be until today is why the pendulum has swung as hard as it has. Americans wanted change, and they finally got it with ferocious retribution because it's been held back for so long.
Like the old Mencken quote:
`Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.`
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#103Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists. I think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.
I’m a scientist currently on an NSF grant. I am certainly poking around other countries to see what’s out there, and I’m not the only one. A lot of scientists (at least in my field, computational chemistry) have decent skills that are transferrable to other areas. So I expect quite a few to move on.
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Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#104The cynic in me thinks that the US is going to roll over and take this fascist shake down. The optimist in me thinks that the people will rise up with a resounding NO and do something about it. Right now I'm not sure which I believe.
By the time there is any actual mass recognition of what is happening, nevermind any attempt to intervene, it will be far too late.
There was a successful coup and the USA as such has fallen, now presumably on the route to failing.
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#105The cynic in me thinks that the US is going to roll over and take this fascist shake down. The optimist in me thinks that the people will rise up with a resounding NO and do something about it. Right now I'm not sure which I believe.
> The cynic in me thinks that the US is going to roll over and take this fascist shake down. The optimist in me thinks that the people will rise up with a resounding NO and do something about it. Right now I'm not sure which I believe. At this point, almost certainly the former. 1. Most Trump supporters do not think that there is a problem. 2. “Regular people” — that is, the folks who don’t track news — won’t notice…
From what I gather, life for most of these "regular people" in Germany was still very much in the tolerable range until well into WWII.
This was a very weird realization and one that left me pretty sad.
Edit to clarify: I also mean no condescension toward "regular people".
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#106[flagged]
[flagged]
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#107The idea is to destroy every part of the American federal government so that techno fiefdoms can be ruled by oligarchs. It's pretty obvious. Not sure if we can stop it! In this particular case, the goal is to privatize science entirely.
https://www.vcinfodocs.com/venture-capital-extremism
I'm convinced that these people and in particular Jarvin read Snow Crash and want to make it reality.
Video with similar content, shows them actually talking about their ideas and plans: https://youtu.be/5RpPTRcz1no
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#108So many brilliant researchers in the US are funded by NSF grants. Even beyond public research, just the private sector benefits just from the training (and associated freedom from not having to chase money and TA) that NSF fellows get is immense. Injecting dumb politics and refusing grants just because people put the words "biases" in their application is a great way to appeal to Republicans's undereducated voters (s…
So you don't think being forced to include a statement on diversity in every single grant request reviewed by the NIH was "injecting dumb politics" but you do think that being forced to NOT include a statement on diversity in every single grant request is?
> forced to NOT include
== "not being allowed to include"
i.e. a restriction on free speech with more worrying implications than "injecting dumb politics"
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#109[flagged]
Yes, but this is not the way to go about enacting change. This is just carnage to prepare for tax cuts.
"Turns out that when you taint good programs like disease monitoring by putting them in a bag with all the color revolution funding and censorship and shaking it really hard, people want to burn the shit bag instead of picking out the good bits."
- https://x.com/MrKapitalist/status/1886670873618473325
Check this $459 million opaque grant to [Redacted] in Nepal: https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_LOGNPL001COM_9543...
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing I find strange is that the other wealthy and powerful stand for the destruction of things that gave the US a huge competitive advantage. The average person isn't hit immediately by the destruction of science. But a far-sighted person with some power should by self-interest not want this. And this, I think, points to the corruption of the entire political class in America with just being upshot.
I believe that what we're not accounting for is the belief among many wealthy people that scientific research and all other intellectual labor will soon be automated by AI. I believe that what those wealthy people aren't accounting for is the need for some class of humans to act as a translation layer between the expert AI systems and the rest of us in order to allow the discoveries and results to percolate through h…
More fucking morons. The gap with biomedical research isn't in the realm of language models, but in the amount of information that exists in biology that we don't know. I'm not sure what percentage of all the genetic data on Earth we've sequenced, but it's not much, and we still don't quite have a mechanical understand of a single cell, much less some complex multicellular organisms with proteins affecting gene expression, cell membrane receptors being reused in 50 different tissue types, molecular secretion and diffusion altering our minds functioning, and electrical currents synchronizing brain firing at a distance.
No LLM trained on PubMed will be able to suss this all out - more data is needed.
Even in pure mathematics, where I am currently a grad student and as needed a big fan of trying to get LLMs to explain stuff to me at 1 am, they just aren't that good. If it's a popular question where I could have tried math overflow, sure, it's probably just going to get some details weirdly wrong, but for subtle complex concepts, it's not making some golden age of truth and understanding.
And God help the LLMs trying to understand physics that are trained on all the BS on Youtube and the blogs.