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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

#411

Post by Gabriel54 »

ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #405
Gabriel54 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not happy with what is going on, to be clear. But I am also not surprised that it is happening, and furthermore I don't believe there was any other alternative to this scorched earth war against DEI. If one had any reservations against DEI before, one would speak only in whispers. Now the backlash is here.

Of course there is an alternative. Through actual leadership. It's not hard to effect change over time with a few memos (e.g. no more "pregnant people") and reviews. It may not be quick enough for certain items already in motion, but that really doesn't matter if the pipeline quickly empties out as the memos take effect. The scorched earth policy is intended to sow fear.

Unfortunately I think the problem is much deeper than something that can be fixed with a few memos. I was just Googling for examples and found this "inclusive language guide" from University of Washington [1]:

> sanity check (why it is problematic): The phrase sanity check is ableist, and unnecessarily references mental health in code bases. It denotes that people with mental illnesses are inferior, wrong, or incorrect. Using an appropriate replacement will also clarify what is intended.

There are of course endless examples. Such sentiments are so absurd on their face, and yet they abound. The first thing "actual leadership" must do is speak the truth and acknowledge that there is a problem.

[1] https://it.uw.edu/guides/identity-diversity-inclusion/inclus...

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#413

Post by alienthrowaway »

bloopernova wrote: post #78
joe_the_user wrote: post #54

Earlier 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.

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…

> So why why do you support explicitly not doing those things when the livelihood of 300 million people depend on the economy being stable?!?

Culture warriors only care about about their "side" winning. It's not an intellectual battle, but an emotional one. Rules be damned, their side is winning and dishing out retribution for, and rolling back decades of defeat on the battle for social values - civil rights, race mixing, gay marriage, LGBTQ rights, and the gall to elect a black president, BLM, #metoo, etc.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#414

Post by baq »

bawolff wrote: post #4

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.

Not happening. Getting significantly more than $100k is close to impossible in most careers in any other country and the dollar is the safest currency to get paid in. Not convinced the desperate folks who want to move despite these are good hires. Anecdotally the only people working any job at all outside of USA that I’ve met were doing that because of their non-US wives not liking it stateside. This isn’t a large group as you can imagine.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#415

Post by Juliate »

ggm wrote: post #22
bawolff wrote: post #4

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.

I want to believe some will move for lifestyle reasons, but the problem is the post war IPO landscape (post 1980s really) across biotech and ICT has made one stark barrier: USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky. That very few do achieve this isn't the point: you cannot do it, in almost any other economy. You have to be socially smart enough to see that a $100k salary and lifesty…

But how do you expect officials that are so bad at transitioning professionally enough, to be good at maintaining and fostering an economy that will support this financial attractiveness?

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#417

Post by throwawaymaths »

tstactplsignore wrote: post #399
throwawaymaths wrote: post #66

just two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910829 the problems that led to these frauds are structural --no amount of patching the system will fix this. maybe we should consider the possibility that we are due for a refactor, which is often painful, but especially painful for people (or code) with an entrenched incentive to continue existing. i dont mean to defend what the administration is doing but I…

But the scientific community identified this failure. They published the evidence against it. And shed light here. And heck, they did a lot of unrelated great science at the same time. Science is a process that will have failures, mistakes, errors, and these are subject to natural selection. We can work to make that process sharper, more rigorous, but that's obviously not what the administration is doing. They're att…

> "They"

they did not. in the case of tessier-levigne, who was responsible for getting him out of there? not the NIH. it was a fucking Stanford undergrad journalism student.

let that sink in. a heroically persistent undergrad had to do the job that the NIH was morally and legally obligated to do.

this "science is self correcting" trope needs to stop being propagated right now. and you can claim eventual self consistency if it resolves a hundred years from now, which would obviously be too little too late. how many people were hurt, how much research dollars were wasted in the meantime. "well, Eventually" is not good enough, and the self correcting slogan is just running cover for entreched interests in the face of their misdeeds.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#418

Post by guerrilla »

goatlover wrote: post #403
username223 wrote: post #100

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.

So who is fighting the US in WW3?

I guess the only option is everyone.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#419

Post by Juliate »

BrenBarn wrote: post #374
kortilla wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not lottery mentality and thinking that it’s equivalent is why Europe isn’t innovating. If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off. If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off. You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.

> You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success. It's fine to want that and to attract those kind of people. What you don't want is to attract people who want to do that in order to make a lot of money .

Yeah but you don’t spend 10s of years of your life studying if your primary goal is just « more money ». The incentive is waaay too far.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#420

Post by GolfPopper »

ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #405
Gabriel54 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not happy with what is going on, to be clear. But I am also not surprised that it is happening, and furthermore I don't believe there was any other alternative to this scorched earth war against DEI. If one had any reservations against DEI before, one would speak only in whispers. Now the backlash is here.

Of course there is an alternative. Through actual leadership. It's not hard to effect change over time with a few memos (e.g. no more "pregnant people") and reviews. It may not be quick enough for certain items already in motion, but that really doesn't matter if the pipeline quickly empties out as the memos take effect. The scorched earth policy is intended to sow fear.

Not just fear. Chaos, uncertainty, and cover for what I expect will be the biggest looting in history.

Even if someone thinks DEI had to go, they ought to be aware that their beliefs are being used as nothing but a smokescreen for unparalleled destruction and plunder.

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