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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

#641

Post by reverius42 »

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.

This is a great explanation for why "no child left behind" is not the right strategy for education.

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

#642

Post by jasonfarnon »

MengerSponge wrote: post #630
jasonfarnon wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Okay, take a moment and think: what about this administration has given you the impression that they're going to take the time to carefully understand a system they're bent on dismantling?

well, this is kind of my point. We might have different ideas of which "system they're bent on dismantling".

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

#643

Post by avs733 »

monooso wrote: post #581
donnachangstein wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It’s also easily abused…the parent post is a pretty solid example of how that happens. More than any individual action by the administration, decades of reinforcement and reification of this thinking in a major segment of society is what is going to doom us.

People celebrating their own destruction by spouting the propaganda they’ve been fed is somehow both terrifying and uniquely interesting to me.

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

#644

Post by const_cast »

monero-xmr wrote: post #639
const_cast wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you assuming that non-white people cannot have the necessary qualifications? If I didn't know any better, I'd conclude that reasoning is... racist. The reality is there are more non-white, qualified people than you could possibly hire. The world is overflowing with them. So if your board is 100% white men, that's really fucking weird . How did that happen? The elephant in the room here is that white men are S…

What’s weird is obsessing over the minute racial details of every person like it’s the antebellum south. The only thing that matters is if someone can do a job - period! Being denied advancement in your career because you don’t have enough drops of black blood, or don’t have enough homosexual sex, is insanely wrong!

> Being denied advancement in your career because you don’t have enough drops of black blood, or don’t have enough homosexual sex, is insanely wrong!

It's a good thing this is something that is not happening, then.

What's happening is you are assuming that black individuals or homosexuals finding success must have been handed something. Which is, obviously, prejudiced. The lede you're burying is that those people were hired because they're qualified.

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

#645

Post by Findeton »

analog31 wrote: post #28
LightBug1 wrote: post #6

[flagged]

No. We did not elect the party majority in Congress or the Supreme Court. If anything, the weakness of our constitution has spoken. Take this as a lesson, and defend your democracy while you still can.

Trump is a reaction to what was there before him (and in between). Perhaps Obama/Biden were not that bad in comparison, but they went too far in one direction and now the reaction is going too far in the other direction.

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

#646

Post by standardUser »

monero-xmr wrote: post #625
const_cast wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Universities are different, who knows how they decide to admit people 2. In the private sector, white men are not disadvantaged. Give me a fucking break man.

Remember with the SEC tried (and failed after Trump’s win) to mandate every board have at least 2 “diverse” (no white dudes) members? Not a lot of merit there! https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2025/01/12/fifth-circuit-vac...

> The only thing that matters is if someone can do a job - period!

That's an absurd lie. People convicted of sex crimes shouldn't have jobs with children. Foreign nationals shouldn't have top security or intelligence jobs. People with a record of substance abuse shouldn't operate heavy machinery. And so on an so forth... I'm boring myself with how obvious this all is.

And maybe, just maybe, extremely powerful jobs that have an outsized influence on our society shouldn't only be offered to straight white men. It's clearly not as obvious of an argument as my previous examples, but it's not absurd either.

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

#647

Post by thrance »

Being anti-science is a core characteristic of fascist ideology [1], nothing about this is surprising.

Academics appear to be biased to the left because the right explicitly hates science and rationality, not because of "wokeism" or "transgender ideology" or "cultural marxism" or whatever red herring fascists currently favor.

> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

- Isaac Asimov, A cult of ignorance, 1980

This cult of ignorance is purely a right-wing one.

[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...

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

#648

Post by standardUser »

coliveira wrote: post #557
standardUser wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Russian asset" implies that the Russian government has compromising information on Donald Trump, or otherwise has leverage over him, which enables them to exert some level of control over his actions. People often point to the fact that, though Trump loudly and frequently criticizes our closest military and economic allies, he seems completely incapable of saying a single negative thing about Russia or Putin. As wel…

The fact that someone agrees with Russia's position doesn't immediately prove that he's an asset owned by them. All you said could be explained if he thinks that peace with Russia would be much better for the US than NATO expansionism, since it would reduce the tremendous cost of maintaining a war machine, put less money on the pockets of the war industry, and increase the opportunities for someone like him who wants…

Russia can end the war it started whenever it would like. It could probably get formal recognition of Crimea as part of the deal, at the very least. Instead, Russia continues to choose war.

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

#649

Post by BeetleB »

philipkglass wrote: post #615
warkdarrior wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

Ah yes. My typo...

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

#650

Post by stock_toaster »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #608
warkdarrior wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Indeed. McConnell has done an incredible amount of damage to America over the course of his time as a Senator (blocking supreme court nominations, refusing to call witnesses during the first Trump impeachment, use of the filibuster, delaying/obstructing health reforms, and on and on). Quite incredible, in a way (depressing).
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