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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

#581

Post by monooso »

donnachangstein wrote: post #540
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…

> I think the whole program may have cost the government maybe $10k total. Your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. There is no government program in existence that costs $10k total, you are almost assuredly ignoring overhead and all other costs. It's like calling a contractor to repair something, then crying foul when he charges $350 because you found the part on Amazon for $15. But let's assume it was $10k. >…

The assumption that if something doesn't have a clear and immediate ROI it can't possibly have any value is extremely myopic.

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

#582

Post by counters »

donnachangstein wrote: post #552
schmidtleonard wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money "wasted" by the NSF is far better spent than money wasted in, say, the Google Graveyard or any other monument to private malinvestment. This is because science has a value capture problem by design, making it systematically uninvestable by the private market, making opportunities plentiful -- and making it an archetypal example of a place where government investment has a role to play, because we can capture va…

This is an opportunity for private industry to step up and step in, while drastically reducing the size of government. I hear the Juicero had an outstanding power supply. For all the waste, some folks probably learned a lot about power electronics. It seems odd to me that of all places, a forum run by a VC outfit, thinks a government jobs program to churn STEM grads with nonsense projects is the way to go.

> This is an opportunity for private industry to step up and step in, while drastically reducing the size of government.

Did... you actually read the comment you're replying to? They're explicitly stating that there is a large pool of work that _the private sector is actively disincentivized to invest in_, and the only way it gets done is for other mechanisms to fill the gap.

The alternative to federal investment in research isn't the private sector picking up slack. It's for the old patronage system of the 1800's to come back. But that system was effective only when the size of problems was relatively "small" - we need to leverage economies of scale to efficiently pursue many types of cutting edge research.

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

#583

Post by simpaticoder »

myko wrote: post #566
Henchman21 wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These tariffs are designed to destroy the American economy and primacy on the world stage .

Pretty much this. Anyone who has paid attention to trump's work knows the goal is to destroy the USA

I've paid attention, and I don't think his goal is to "destroy the USA". His goal is self-enrichment, and side-effects don't matter. He is a master at promising the world, and then deflecting blame when he doesn't deliver, and yet the people love him anyway. It is very easy to destroy something under those circumstances without having the goal of destruction. See Hanlon's Razor.

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

#584

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

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.

> I think you can consider "DEI" as unfair racial discrimination

i'm sorry, nothing personal, but this mentality is just inexcusably dense and reality-avoidant. i hope you don't believe this nonsense so strongly that you think i'm attacking you for it but i think we can hold ourselves to a higher standard of cognition here.

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

#585

Post by sfpotter »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #554
Frost1x wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you’re being facetious, but I think there’s some nugget buried in this sarcasm. One issue with our ever increasingly intellectual focused economy is that it leaves behind people who may just not be cut out for these such careers. I’m not against having these economies (I too used to work in supercomputing, with national labs), they’re very necessary, but we need to find a way for people who might not fit very…

I have a bit of a bias in advocating more for enabling excellence than accommodating average. I will concede we have done a terrible job at sharing the harvest, but it’s often the excellent that are responsible for our harvest being so plentiful to begin with.

Expand your view of what constitutes excellence.

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

#586

Post by warkdarrior »

donnachangstein wrote: post #552
schmidtleonard wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money "wasted" by the NSF is far better spent than money wasted in, say, the Google Graveyard or any other monument to private malinvestment. This is because science has a value capture problem by design, making it systematically uninvestable by the private market, making opportunities plentiful -- and making it an archetypal example of a place where government investment has a role to play, because we can capture va…

This is an opportunity for private industry to step up and step in, while drastically reducing the size of government. I hear the Juicero had an outstanding power supply. For all the waste, some folks probably learned a lot about power electronics. It seems odd to me that of all places, a forum run by a VC outfit, thinks a government jobs program to churn STEM grads with nonsense projects is the way to go.

Those STEM grads took years to train through NSF-funded programs. Why would private industry waste their quarterly revenues on STEM grads who will become useful only after 4-6 years of training?

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

#587

Post by jjtheblunt »

unethical_ban wrote: post #495
jjtheblunt wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If it isn't happening in good faith, then you can't call it a "reorg". That's like shooting something in the head and saying you "reorganized" their brain matter.

The article itself says it's a reorg...but isn't clear if it's more.

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

#588

Post by warkdarrior »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #578
dragonwriter wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teslas are self driving on the roads everyday. Name one jursidiction where Teslas are allowed to operate on public roads without a human driver on the wheel. Because other people are doing that commercially, because they have demonstrated capacities that Tesla has not.

Well that is a goal post. They can do it doesn’t matter if they are allowed to or not. My friends tesla I’ve seen it in action. It goes on the highway. It goes on all the streets even hilly ones unlike waymo. It can even find a free parking spot in the lot and fully park the car. All while he does nothing at all with his hands on his lap. So yeah it totally can self drive.

> It goes on all the streets even hilly ones unlike waymo.

Waymo has been autonomously driving throughout San Francisco and its many hills for years.

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

#589

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #501
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You speak of equal opportunity . What happens in practice is enforced equal outcomes which entails compromising on principles and standards to get the desired result. i.e. "Group X is under-performing at math" so therefore the problem is with inherent bias in math and we won't expect engineers and scientists to have competency in this domain to get the makeup of people we have decided upon from the start.

I'll add the people that promoted it often said that amongst themselves while more publicly just talking about "diversity." They usually believed in imtersectionality, redistribution of wealth/power, etc. Their fix is systematic discrimination against specific groups to redistribute power to achieve the outcomes. And, if other groups become dominant, they still favor them over white people. We've seen that these ideo…

> Their fix is systematic discrimination against specific groups to redistribute power to achieve the outcomes

you're talking about the american revolution against the british here, right?

or are you referring to the same thing somewhere else?

> Now, a different group favoring no racism, equal opportunity, and generosity to all groups based on need is reversing the prior group's work

right, the problem is that the current elites in power in the current usa government are villifying those people and trying to reverse the reversal: restore racism; eliminate equity; allocate generosity based on political alignment and fealty to one particular personality rather than need

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

#590

Post by heylook »

absolutelastone wrote: post #500
regularization wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hinton and his students studied for years on US (and then Canadian) government grants. The year Alexnet came out, Nvidia was awarded tens of millions by DARPA for Project Osprey. It's an odd historical revisionism where from Fairchild to the Internet to the web to AI, government grants and government spending are washed out of the picture. The government funded AI research for decades.

I think their point is the billions in private investment which preceded those millions. I think this is a common issue in computer science, where credit is given to sexy "software applications" like AI when the real advances were in the hardware that enabled them, which everyone just views as an uninteresting commodity.

> I think their point is the billions in private investment which preceded those millions.

But the "billions" didn't precede the "millions". They're just completely incorrect, and anyone that knows even a tiny amount about the actual history can see it immediately. That's why these comment sections are so polarized. It's a bunch of people vibe commenting vs people that have spent even like an hour researching the industry.

The history of semiconductor enterprise in the US is just a bunch of private companies lobbying the government for contracts, grants, and legal/trade protections. All of them would've folded at several different points without military contracts or government research grants. Read Chip War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_War:_The_Fight_for_the_Wo...

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