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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

#601

Post by gusgus01 »

simpaticoder wrote: post #583
myko wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I prefer the corollary: Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

At this point, whether it's stupidity, or others taking advantage of that stupidity to induce malicious actions. It doesn't really matter and they should be regarded as malicious and stopped.

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

#602

Post by morkalork »

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…

Isn't that basically half the motivation for the national ignition facility? To maintain a pool experts in nuclear physics just in case the government every needs or wants to design new nuclear weapons?

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

#604

Post by intended »

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.

Being in such a forum doesn’t mean that many of us aren’t educated about economics.

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

#605

Post by sleet_spotter »

decimalenough wrote: post #577
beachy wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the American experience that decisions are made at the executive level based on faulty intelligence, while people working at the coal face such as yourself have a much better understanding of what's really going on. Case in point the Vietnam war, which cost thousands of lives because decisions were based on statistics from the field which had been heavily manipulated as they percolated upwards. Right now, just a…

> It's the American experience that decisions are made at the executive level based on faulty intelligence, while people working at the coal face such as yourself have a much better understanding of what's really going on. The article notes that the people being axed are NSF execs making funding decisions, and contrasts this with the NIH, where panels of outside experts make the call. I can't say I have personal expe…

NSF also uses expert panels to recommend grants for funding. The systems are very similar.

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

#606

Post by 47282847 »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #579
baxtr wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean when you say "only"?!

Many scientists believe the earth is, in fact, much older than that.

One is religious freedom, the other is science. You pick which is which. ;)

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

#607

Post by magicalist »

decimalenough wrote: post #577
beachy wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the American experience that decisions are made at the executive level based on faulty intelligence, while people working at the coal face such as yourself have a much better understanding of what's really going on. Case in point the Vietnam war, which cost thousands of lives because decisions were based on statistics from the field which had been heavily manipulated as they percolated upwards. Right now, just a…

> It's the American experience that decisions are made at the executive level based on faulty intelligence, while people working at the coal face such as yourself have a much better understanding of what's really going on. The article notes that the people being axed are NSF execs making funding decisions, and contrasts this with the NIH, where panels of outside experts make the call. I can't say I have personal expe…

> The article notes that the people being axed are NSF execs making funding decisions, and contrasts this with the NIH, where panels of outside experts make the call.

I believe you're mistaken on both counts? The contrast mentioned in the article is just that for the NSF, division directors alone can potentially scuttle approved grants.

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

#608

Post by insane_dreamer »

warkdarrior wrote: post #594
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the head of the senate refused to let the president submit a new SC justice.

The head of the senate was elected, so presumably his actions reflected the wishes of his constituents.

Yes but the Prez was blocked from carrying out the wishes of his constituents (on a terrible argument and on that surprise surprise McConnell reversed his position on once Trump was in).

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

#610

Post by insane_dreamer »

stefan_ wrote: post #556
insane_dreamer wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking about scientific research and specifically academic institutions. China only has a half-dozen of top academic institutions with high credibility: Peking U, Tsinghua U, Fudan U, Zhejiang U, and _maybe_ one or two others (Renmin U in some fields). There a number of mid-level unis, and the rest are low credibility (for lots of reasons). By comparison, the US has 100+ (you could even argue 200+) well respec…

I think you are missing a bunch, and the average one of those probably has 10x the grad students of a US one, working on in average ten times as important things. (And then frankly half the papers from these vaunted US institutions have author lists that could equally be from Wuhan or Peking university, and a bunch of those will inevitably return to professorships in their native country, not like anyone is funding p…

Unless they’ve gotten a lot better in the past decade I’m not missing a bunch.

But yes in terms of sheer quantity of graduates and and research papers China wins out but what matters is the quality. The US has problems with lousy and even outright false papers but in China it’s endemic.

And to your point, the reason people come to the US from Peking or Tsinghua to do their pHd or postdoc is because of the high quality research, which is why cutting it is so detrimental

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