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NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

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Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#301

Post by ab5tract »

sneak wrote: post #291
AdamN wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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True libertarians are disgusted by authoritarians. A reduction in the size of the US federal government (and its budget) is long overdue. Both of these things can be true. It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry. If understanding is your goal, it may be a useful intellectual exercise to internally steelman the counterargument to…

> It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry.

Considering this is simply a religious statement posing as an assertion of fact, I would argue it is anti-intellectual to an extreme.

Please share some libertarian paradises where this has proven true. How’s Kentucky doing again?

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#302

Post by fallingknife »

AdamN wrote: post #284
ddahlen wrote: post #38

I have been in and out of the academic world my entire career. I have worked as a programmer/engineer for two universities and a national lab, and worked at a startup founded by some professors. There is huge uncertainty with the people whom I have worked with, nobody seems to be sure what is going to happen, but it feels like it wont be good. Hiring freezes, international graduate students receiving emails to self d…

[flagged]

Couldn't find the person you wanted to argue with in the comments so you just pretended they are here and claim the community is "part of the problem" even though you couldn't actually find one of them.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#303

Post by oldprogrammer2 »

arunabha wrote: post #283
hermitShell wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence towards this allegiance? Why should we attribute to malice what we could attribute to incompetence, or greed?

One piece of evidence would be that Russia, Belarus and North Korea have been specifically excluded from US tariffs. You could argue that the net effect is negligible since we don't import a lot from those countries, but the signal being sent to long term allies is devastating to America's future relations with them.

The US has trade sanctions with those countries.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#304

Post by gitremote »

762236 wrote: post #172
ourmandave wrote: post #35

Last week, staff were briefed on a new process for vetting grant proposals that are found to be out of step with a presidential directive on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI),... In the new structure, even if a revised proposal gets the green light from a division director, a new body whose membership has not been determined will take a fresh look to ensure it conforms to the agency’s new standard for making awa…

DEI in practice is illegal (we don't get to make decisions based on race, or other protected categories of a person's identity). I get trained on this once a year at work. What we do instead is improve the probability that underrepresented people can enter the hiring pipeline, e.g., by investing in schools.

DEI is not illegal. Some implementations can be illegal (racial quotas), but other implementations are not (setting up a job fair booth in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) instead of only Ivy League universities; not preferring Ivy League dropouts over HBCU graduates).

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#305

Post by Ar-Curunir »

cubefox wrote: post #255
ourmandave wrote: post #35

Last week, staff were briefed on a new process for vetting grant proposals that are found to be out of step with a presidential directive on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI),... In the new structure, even if a revised proposal gets the green light from a division director, a new body whose membership has not been determined will take a fresh look to ensure it conforms to the agency’s new standard for making awa…

I think you can consider "DEI" as unfair racial discrimination even if you don't consider yourself a conservative. It's not the case that you have to agree with everything "your" side says, and disagree with everything coming from "their" side.

DEI in these grant proposal didn’t really have anything to do with affirmative action. Rather, it covers a wide swathe, including setting up undergraduate research programs for poorer students, offering travel scholarships, outreach programs at high schools, and so on.

It’s easy to get caught up in culture war nonsense, but that nonsense doesn’t usually align with what’s on the ground.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#307

Post by yoyohello13 »

devwastaken wrote: post #180
ddahlen wrote: post #38

I have been in and out of the academic world my entire career. I have worked as a programmer/engineer for two universities and a national lab, and worked at a startup founded by some professors. There is huge uncertainty with the people whom I have worked with, nobody seems to be sure what is going to happen, but it feels like it wont be good. Hiring freezes, international graduate students receiving emails to self d…

[flagged]

This assumes only research that can be turned into a product should be pursued. Maximizing profit is not actually a virtue, no matter how hard the business types try to say it is.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#308

Post by monkpit »

swores wrote: post #192
tessierashpool wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the interesting pieces of science that I think a lot of people don't think about is strategic investment. the Internet itself began with DARPA. the web at CERN. both came from publicly-funded research.

In case anyone else has the same memory fuzziness I had that led me to thinking "I could've sworn it was ARPA, not DARPA, that the internet came out of"... it was ARPA, but they aren't separate organisations as I for some reason thought they were. To quote Wikipedia: > " The name of the organization first changed from its founding name, ARPA, to DARPA, in March 1972, changing back to ARPA in February 1993, then rever…

Hence the name arpanet

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#309

Post by zhivota »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #300
zhivota wrote: post #295

I worked at two National Laboratories, Argonne and Idaho, on NSF funded internship grants. The second one turned into a full time job, again on an NSF grant. The first one was on supercomputing, writing proof of concept code for a new supercomputing operating system (ZeptoOS). The second was on the automated stitching of imagery from UAVs for military applications (at a time when this was not commoditized at all, we…

[flagged]

You could be right... I'm just going off of what I've seen in the other departments they touched. Let's hope at least this program would be left untouched.

https://www.nsf.gov/funding/initiatives/reu

There are tons more though, this is only the tip of the iceberg of what the NSF funds of course.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#310

Post by jjtheblunt »

dralley wrote: post #235
xhkkffbf wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

They're pushing a 55% budget cut. There is absolutely no universe in which you can justify that with rhetoric around "DEI" science. This is going to cut very, very deep into basic STEM / biomedical research. They're cancelling mRNA research, they're flagging research that uses words like "trauma" or studies how medications impact men and women differently. There's no sensible agenda behind all of this, it's just back…

could the 55% budget cut be a bureaucracy reduction, not a dei issue?
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