121–130 of 1001 posts
Part of me thinks this is just incompetence. People put in charge to "change" things without knowing what the thing is or does and just randomly mashing buttons.
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?
As Sir Ian Jacob said, the Allies won World War II because "our German scientists were better than their German scientists." Brain drain is a real problem for fascist countries.
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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 weird spanner in the works is that while people may be unhappy, they are unhappy because of things they believe that aren't true. Covid response in the US wasn't that bad; global warming really is causing the floods and fires and hurricanes and the EVs really are helping, as would methane emissions rules and so on; if people think the bi-coastal elites are looking down on them (and they are), like so what; that's…
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…
"Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI. I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first."
- Altman to Musk, immediately before proposing what became OpenAI ( https://www.techemails.com/p/elon-musk-and-openai )
"OpenAI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google. There obviously needs to be immediate and dramatic action or everyone except for Google will be consigned to irrelevance."
- Musk to Altman, later ( https://www.techemails.com/p/elon-musk-openai-path-of-certai... )
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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.
Seems 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.
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The wealthy will just take their money and leave the country. And for all you HN readers supporting these massive changes: you'd test changes beforehand and plan their deployment carefully if this were software. So why why do you support explicitly not doing those things when the livelihood of 300 million people depend on the economy being stable?!? And before the inevitable derail or whatabout attempt: Don't play po…
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> 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…
I don't know why you're being downvoted. > 1. Most Trump supporters do not think that there is a problem. Talk to any conservative -- even people who are/were skeptical of Trump -- or browse any conservative-leaning social media. It's clear that the people who voted for Trump fully understood what they voted for: they wanted what's happening . Project 2025 is a good thing in the eyes of many. Maybe they think politic…
They believe it has already been politicized by people who hate them.
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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.
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Unfortunately, advanced technological based civilization is not "ok" with destroying the collective and knowledge based activities of scientific research. One can't advance far if you stop science when it makes mistakes - the advantage of science is it finds and fixes the mistakes. This, and the federal funding of research, is why the collective knowledge of humanity is doubling ever decade or so.