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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

#691

Post by apical_dendrite »

frob wrote: post #11

The NSF funded my graduate research. It feels like someone is going through my past and burning all of the ladders that helped me grow and succeed.

I feel this way as well. They're killing or gutting so many programs that help to develop the next generation. Not just NSF and NIH, but also Americorps, Job Corps, educational exchange programs like the Fullbright. I just saw they were making a 50% cut to the peace corps.

It feels like they want to destroy everything that's optimistic and forward-thinking.

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

#692

Post by regularization »

absolutelastone wrote: post #617
heylook wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thos…

> Go back far enough and there was only private industry, and no government funding until the space race basically.

How do you think the railroads were built in the US? The bonds of the Pacific Railroad Acts date back to the 1860s. Pretty easy to build a railway line when government foots the bill.

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

#693

Post by simpaticoder »

gusgus01 wrote: post #601
simpaticoder wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a sense in which wilful ignorance IS malicious. Whether the fruits of that ignorance are therefore malicious is another question. I'm not a lawyer, but I know that they make a clear distinction between intent and ignorance. That is how, in fact, ignorance (or its appearance), becomes a strength. You cannot lie if you don't know. Even better is when you display ignorance but then somehow also have millions of people convinced they can read between the lines that you are not ignorant. "The best way to lie is to tell the truth and not be believed," as Twain once said.

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

#694

Post by vel0city »

graycat wrote: post #572
overfeed wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>$10k to give people who otherwise didn't have a road into science, exactly what they need to get their foot in the door. The current admin thinks those $10k grants are better spent by giving them to some billionaire via tax cuts. Impoverishing the many to enrich a few is a 3rd-world, banana-republic mindset, and unfortunately is not self-correcting. The politically-connected will see the pile of money controlled by…

> some billionaire via tax cuts The current noisy news is taxes for the rich the same or higher, not "cuts".

Only for those too ignorant to actually understand what's being extremely loosely proposed. And he's totally non-committal about the whole vague thing.

Hiking income taxes on W2 salaries isn't going to touch those billionaires. They'll still get massive tax cuts.

And that's assuming he's actually saying these things in good faith.

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

#695

Post by vel0city »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #619
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?

"ideological bent" like greenhouse gasses cause climate change and guns just might actually kill people and 2+2=4.

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

#696

Post by absolutelastone »

regularization wrote: post #692
absolutelastone wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thos…

> Go back far enough and there was only private industry, and no government funding until the space race basically. How do you think the railroads were built in the US? The bonds of the Pacific Railroad Acts date back to the 1860s. Pretty easy to build a railway line when government foots the bill.

Government funding of research. We were talking about the NSF after all, not free markets versus central planning.

On that though, I read somewhere that the hierarchical committee-led operation of the funding agencies is the same way communist systems dole out money for everything else too. Not sure if they were being completely serious.

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

#697

Post by ethbr1 »

breckenedge wrote: post #670
Loughla wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something, something small enough to drown it in the bathtub. This isn't new. Republicans have always worked to erode government offerings to justify further cuts. What is new is the scale and speed. Is there literally nothing Congress can do or are they just doing nothing?

They’ve been doing nothing for decades.

> They’ve been doing nothing for decades.

Here's a list of the 250+ pieces of nothing that the 118th Congress passed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_118th_Un...

If you're going to reach for hyperbole, at least make it defensible.

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

#698

Post by almosthere »

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 problem with seeing it this way, is someone was making $1M as overhead to hire you for 10k.

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

#699

Post by streptomycin »

const_cast wrote: post #628
streptomycin wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah anecdotes don't tell you much. You may have noticed I was also replying to an anecdote. What tells you more is that the diversity statement exists and they say it's used as part of scoring. Therefore, unless the amount of score it counts for is infinitesimally small, some people win/lose based on the content of their diversity statement. Was that me? Who knows. But unless the whole thing was just busy work for n…

I think it's important to remember that, historically, science has been very racist and very sexist. It's not like the diversity statement came out of nowhere - the majority of our understanding of a lot of topics only comes from studying white men. This is why AA men and women have significantly worse healthcare outcomes, or why women are more likely to die in a car crash. Yes, maybe it's slightly inconvenient to wr…

I will give you credit for having an explanation that at least makes more sense than "the diversity statement is just for fun and doesn't do anything", which is the explanation that I usually hear!

But yeah I am aware that the more reasonable DEI supporters say things similar to what you said. Just be aware that there are other people who are skeptical that the "improve outcomes for a variety of minority groups" part actually happens, and also think that DEI has various other negative consequences in addition to that.

I wouldn't really say I needed to "suck it up" since not winning the GRFP is a pretty minor thing - it's very hard to win, so a negative outcome was not really surprising and didn't really cost me anything more than a line on my resume. I was happy to even get honorable mention! My actual concern is when similar tactics are used for more meaningful things, and the second order effects of such policies. The GRFP was just the biggest example of it directly affecting me personally, since I didn't stick around in academia too long (for multiple reasons, not just DEI), so it makes a good enough anecdote I guess.

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

#700

Post by absolutelastone »

camdenreslink wrote: post #689
absolutelastone wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thos…

Many industries are uninvestable in their early days. How many get to the point where private funding makes sense without initial government funding for fundamental science and research? Where will we be in 15 years if the government starts pulling funding like the NSF? We might find the private money at that time is funding those future industries in other countries instead.

Seeing all the recent tariff fights and actually finding out what the story is behind some of the different industries, I am becoming much more of the opinion that other countries take over industries as the result of specific agendas targeting those industries and maintaining a large degree of monopoly over them. The US has not reacted much because each country only took one industry or so and it was a way to manipulate them or appease them or whatever, but it is turning into death by a thousand cuts. I definitely think the US government needs to be a lot more involved than they have been in a range of ways. That list of ridiculous-sounding cancelled NSF grants wasn't it though. If you're talking about the SBIR program, that is pretty tiny. I assume it will continue, it is legally set to be at 2% or whatever.
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