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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

#611

Post by schmidtleonard »

intended wrote: post #604
donnachangstein wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, I bet VCs are far _more_ aware than the average Joe of the wide body of worthwhile but uninvestable ideas. After all, they are responsible for saying "no" to them and gently redirecting them to government/patronage/charity while asking to keep in touch in case the field becomes investable (because that's the story of how their boss got rich).

"Value capture problems don't exist because capitalism is perfect" is the kind of misconception that can only survive far away from the actual process of finding investments and making returns.

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

#612

Post by Ray20 »

Smeevy wrote: post #470
naasking wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> several independent actions Trump has taken that are all inexplicably sympathetic to Russian interests Is it really inexplicable though? Or is it more plausible that you simply don't understand the motives, and probably haven't really tried?

You obviously understand how these actions benefit the country of which Donald Trump is the President. Why don't you explain it to the rest of the class?

[flagged]

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

#613

Post by magicalist »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #587
unethical_ban wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

It also says they're firing a bunch of subject matter experts and want to slash the budget by 55%. What other "more" are you looking for?

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

#614

Post by keeda »

cubefox wrote: post #440
kjkjadksj wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think that then you misunderstand what DEI really means. Conservatives assume black people can never be smart and therefor hiring standards must fall for DEI programs to happen. The reality is that there are more smart black and white people capable of doing your job than you are capable of hiring. So maybe consider taking the black woman who is just as qualified so your department is no longer so lily white a…

There is data (e.g. on Harvard university admissions) which shows that average SAT cut-off scores of admitted students are very different for various racial groups, which strongly hints at DEI based discrimination. I don't agree with that happening. I think people should be admitted/rejected based only on their ability, not partly based on whether they happen to fall in some group for which the quota has to be increa…

Assuming performance on the SAT is an unbiased measure of ability is the flaw in this premise. It is well known that SAT performance is correlated with race, family income and gender. For instance, girls reliably score worse on SAT Math even when they outperform boys in school on the same subject.

However, it turns out family income is an even stronger predictor of test performance. But family income also happens to be correlated with race, so the race/SAT score correlation is more likely an income/SAT score correlation.

In fact, some even maintain that the process of selecting SAT questions is itself a self-reinforcing bias. If you want data, searches like "Is the SAT biased" or "Is the SAT racist" will take you down that rabbithole.

Given that the testing process has clear shortcomings, it seems fair to account for that during admissions. Unfortunately, this looks a lot like very obvious reverse discrimination if one is not aware of the non-obvious, systemic discrimination it is adjusting for.

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

#615

Post by philipkglass »

warkdarrior wrote: post #593
BeetleB wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone who is the CIO of a federal agency. DOGE used scapy to analyze job descriptions and grants. Yes to ML, but still done as a blunt force instrument.

> DOGE used scapy to analyze job descriptions and grants. Scapy, the network packet library?? How does one apply network-packet analysis to job descriptions and grants???

In that context scapy was probably a typo for spaCy, a popular natural language processing library for Python:

https://spacy.io/

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

#616

Post by tstrimple »

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.

Uninhabited islands made the tariff list, but those countries somehow managed to slip through.

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

#617

Post by absolutelastone »

heylook wrote: post #590
absolutelastone wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ind…

You seem to be arguing that the second government touches anything then everything it does gets credited to the government funding column. Seems simplistic to me, but you can believe what you like. Go back far enough and there was only private industry, and no government funding until the space race basically.

Either way the fact remains that the billions spent developing GPU's preceded the millions spent to use those GPUs for AI. Not sure what it has to do with polarization of the comment section. I assume it's just people seeking an opportunity to heap abuse on anything close to a representative of the evil "other side".

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

#618

Post by const_cast »

sneak wrote: post #461
kevinventullo wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry. The problem is that industry is inherently narrowly focused in short-to-medium term profitability, and cannot be relied on to carry out work which benefits society as a whole, including many conventionally “intellectual” pursuits such as: educating the populace, or fundamental research wit…

Some industries are. Many industries do not. Pharmaceutical companies and aerospace companies are frequently investing in long term projects.

A small minority of the private sector is burning money on long-term investments. Another small minority are burning money on ventures which cannot be monetized. At their intersection, there exists zero companies. Yes, zero. Not close to zero, just zero. And it will always be zero.

How will you survive if what you're doing takes both a lot of time and makes no money?

Think about something like the FDA. It's a cost sink. The private sector will never do something like that because it's explicitly anti-profit.

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

#619

Post by jasonfarnon »

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…

is this type of research really at risk? I thought the feds were after research with an ideological bent. Rather than speculate about how the feds might see certain research as ideological, can we have some concrete examples of the type of research projects that have been discontinued?

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

#620

Post by freejazz »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #431
freejazz wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, what's the difference between the former and the latter? My whole understanding of DEI is perfectly described by the thing you said is illegal. Otherwise, you did not describe what "DEI" is, so I hope you can understand my confusion.

"DEI" is the rebranding of "affirmative action",† which was itself a euphemism for distributing special privileges (most notably jobs, higher education placements, and loan approvals) to members of legally favored racial groups while punishing members of disfavored groups. All of the relevant laws specify that (1) you are not allowed to treat anybody differently based on their race, and (2) if your outcome numbers do…

You think people were getting loan approvals because they were minorities? And that it was also at the cost of "disfavored groups"? Is there anything to back this up? Redlining was a real phenomenon. You might not agree with Coates or his proposed solution, but I've not seen anyone attack the numbers, which speak for themselves.

I don't agree with pretty much the entirety of your post but that stuck out.

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