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What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

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Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#111

Post by csa »

robbiewxyz wrote: post #105
csa wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

> From what I gather, life for most of these "regular people" types in Germany was still very much in the tolerable range until well into WWII.

Correct.

I’ve heard some harrowing stories about the moment of realization straight from the mouths of some of these people.

Edit: To be clear, I’m referring to my family and their friends who lived through it.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#112

Post by _yb2s »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #74

[flagged]

1. I don't think allocating funds to reproduce research would be worth the cost of displacing other new research. The current way of discovering that research is wrong by trying to build on it isn't perfect either, but it is still more efficient than systematically reproducing a lot of research. In my experience, scientific reproducibility has gotten substantially better in recent years- the standard of evidence, and the quality and correctness of statistical analyses are both much higher than they used to be.

2. Experts don't consider that human research contributed to COVID because it is completely implausible to anyone that understands virology research. Moreover, current safety standards for doing research on infectious human diseases in BSL level 3 and 4 labs are incredibly rigorous- and although they carry non-zero risk, what we learn from this research more than outweighs it by improving our ability to treat and prevent disease.

See here for a discussion of what virologists think about the lab leak theory: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-special-how-the-pandemic-be...

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#113

Post by stonogo »

dekhn wrote: post #23
boc wrote: post #9

Watching the tech community waltz into DC and pretend that they know how all the levers of government work is pathetic. Are there inefficiencies? Sure. Are there places to improve? Of course. But pretending that they can understand the intricacies of literally decades of institutional knowledge and deep connections across the globe in the course of a single weekend is asinine. We need to do better. The US government…

Note this isn't representative of the tech industry in general. When I worked for Google I visited NIH, sat on study groups, and helped advise program managers how to move more compute to the cloud. Like many other techies in SV I have a PhD in a quantitative science and understand how NIH works. My efforts were entirely designed to help update the establishment, not tear it down, and that's true for the wide swath o…

I'm sorry, but your defense for the "not all techies" argument is that you flew to NIH and told them how to stop investing in their own infrastructure and funnel tax dollars to private hosting rentals instead? I cannot wrap my head around this as a defense of anything. Seems like the current crew is just cutting out the middleman.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#114

Post by allturtles »

justanotheratom wrote: post #109
SkipperCat wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_…

Yes, many people are impulsive and foolish, we shouldn't encourage that. Nor should we cheer on the attempt to create an all-powerful executive that can do whatever it wants with no checks from existing legislation, the courts, or Congress. Trump's goal seems to be an elective dictatorship, and we'll see how long the elective part lasts.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#115

Post by Arainach »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #74

[flagged]

Shut down all federal science funding on the off chance a conspiracy theory is true? Talk about an overreaction.

Similarly how are you going to reproduce studies by not funding anything?

>just run every paper through an LLM and check for errors as part of the peer review process

Oh, I see. Well, that at least explains the rest of your post.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#116

Post by mjfl »

tehjoker wrote: post #77
freshpots wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barring all of the hyperbole of your comment, I find it astounding how you're unaware of this with such a "thumb on the pulse" of world news: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/feb/04/benjamin-... Trump said Palestinians have “no alternative” but to “permanently” leave Gaza due to the devastation left by Israel’s war on Hamas. He described Gaza as a “pure demolition site” and claimed Palestinians would “love…

> Trump is literally for completely ridding Gaza of the Palestinians so Israel can colonize it. An ACTUAL genocide. This was the goal of the Biden administration. The difference now is that without Israel demolishing Gaza every day, the resistance has demonstrated they cannot be dislodged. Trump has no credibility. They simply cannot do it and both the U.S. and Israeli officials that enabled this are war criminals th…

Hasbara bots are out in extreme force.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#117

Post by justanotheratom »

allturtles wrote: post #114
justanotheratom wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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_…

Yes, many people are impulsive and foolish, we shouldn't encourage that. Nor should we cheer on the attempt to create an all-powerful executive that can do whatever it wants with no checks from existing legislation, the courts, or Congress. Trump's goal seems to be an elective dictatorship, and we'll see how long the elective part lasts.

why do you assume there are no checks?

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#118

Post by RajT88 »

dan_can_code wrote: post #3

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.

I live in the US; born here, lived here all my life.

The former is 100% how it will go. The only question is: how bad will it get?

A poster down thread mentions a million dead immigrants. I personally think it will just be in the low 6 figures. Maybe high 5 figures.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#119

Post by pizzafeelsright »

angoragoats wrote: post #79
pizzafeelsright wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What books did "they" burn? I'm asking about the actual books.

Are you asking about the Nazis in Germany? The first major book burning was in Berlin at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) where they burned thousands of books containing information about, among other things, LGBT people. Or are you asking about the current situation? They’re trying to burn all of it —- any research papers funded by the NSF or NIH.

[flagged]

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#120

Post by bloopernova »

alaxhn wrote: post #69
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #6

So 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?

I think people are more concerned about the economic fallout and the illegality of what is being done.
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