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What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

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Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#921

Post by user3939382 »

cat_theorist wrote: post #810
Gabriel54 wrote: post #141

Despite all the hyperbole in this thread I will try to speak plainly. It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc. I'm sure most people choose to close their eyes to such things and move on and focus on the actual important work but there must be unimaginable waste going o…

Hiring people based on race (white) and gender (male) is what happened _before_ Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives. Do you know what is the original and ultimate identity politics? Enslaving people because you deem them inferior to your own race. The civil war, the civil rights movement, and modern social justice movements are a response to this, not the root of the conflict. I'm a white guy in academia - no…

How does it require ignorance to believe something that’s spelled out in black and white policies? It’s not even belief it’s just reading comprehension at that point.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#922

Post by mvieira38 »

amelius wrote: post #529
kortilla wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not lottery mentality and thinking that it’s equivalent is why Europe isn’t innovating. If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off. If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off. You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.

You are assuming that only money will make people do incredible things, but you only have to look at open source to know that this is false.

We can't ignore the influence of money even on open source, though. How many people are contributing in an anonymous manner, so they can't claim financial benefits from publicity and networking? How many open source projects are rejecting VC funding?

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#923

Post by esalman »

qwe----3 wrote: post #158
sseagull wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a scientist currently on an NSF grant. I am certainly poking around other countries to see what’s out there, and I’m not the only one. A lot of scientists (at least in my field, computational chemistry) have decent skills that are transferrable to other areas. So I expect quite a few to move on.

Good luck getting 500k+ grants in other countries. If you leave there won't be a shortage of postdocs looking for a new tenure track position.

It sounds as if the universe revolves around the US. Did you know that one of the biggest HPC cluster in the world is in Saudi Arabia? I know grad students who went there got duplex villas for free lodging.

Before you start criticizing Saudi government, the reason we are discussing this right now is because a fascist government is forcing scientists out of the US.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#924

Post by esalman »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #761
jmward01 wrote: post #490

This is a coup and we are calmly debating budgets. Debating the % of budget and how useful organization x is and if y will still get grant money, and, and, and... All of this is ignoring the big elephant in the room that there is one single person deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king. The right thing to be debating is how we can stop this from continuing and how we can hold those resp…

The other big elephant in the room is that the self-appointed wanna-be ruler, Musk, owns companies which have received very large amounts of both government (taxpayer) grants and contracts. Back in 2015, the LA Times reported Musk's companies had received nearly $5 billion in grants. That's taxpayer money. Plus there's the SpaceX contracts--not saying those are unwarranted, certainly SpaceX deserves the contracts mor…

The big elephant is called conflict of interest.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#925

Post by esalman »

macinjosh wrote: post #730
jmward01 wrote: post #490

This is a coup and we are calmly debating budgets. Debating the % of budget and how useful organization x is and if y will still get grant money, and, and, and... All of this is ignoring the big elephant in the room that there is one single person deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king. The right thing to be debating is how we can stop this from continuing and how we can hold those resp…

No, we the people voted for this. This is what democracy looks like.

Democracy is a broken, hackable system and it shows why. Theoretically in democracy you're supposed to be elected by the majority and then ensure the rights of the minority. When you're elected by the majority and then make the life of minorities as hard as possible, that's fascism- which is what real world practice of democracy has become.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#926

Post by malwrar »

cat_theorist wrote: post #810
Gabriel54 wrote: post #141

Despite all the hyperbole in this thread I will try to speak plainly. It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc. I'm sure most people choose to close their eyes to such things and move on and focus on the actual important work but there must be unimaginable waste going o…

Hiring people based on race (white) and gender (male) is what happened _before_ Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives. Do you know what is the original and ultimate identity politics? Enslaving people because you deem them inferior to your own race. The civil war, the civil rights movement, and modern social justice movements are a response to this, not the root of the conflict. I'm a white guy in academia - no…

> Enslaving people because you deem them inferior to your own race.

This is irrelevant to the discussion of hiring in 2025, unless you believe your fellow “white” population harbors literal beliefs of a.) racial identity and b.) racial superiority, that c.) the “white” people making hiring decisions are actively excluding candidates based on these beliefs, and that d.) application of a nonwhite bias is just and measured in the face of a-c. I think all are incredible claims, and they’ve only lasted a decade because they have become rabidly-defended shibboleths for people who want to fix racism (and sexism and…).

> I cannot fathom the ignorance necessary to believe that white males are at an disadvantage because of university administrators being "woke"

If 1000 group A individuals and 10 group B individuals apply for a team, and both groups are accepted at ~50% due to a group B preference, then group B is ~100x as likely to be selected for the role due to that preference. Such observations are where my own perception of “disadvantage” comes from. Unless you’re claiming that no such preference exists, or that some prejudice you might have about group A justifies its individual members’ relatively unlikely chances of being selected, I can’t see how this preference doesn’t qualify as a disadvantage for such individuals.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#927

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

jakeinspace wrote: post #306
dmagee wrote: post #59

There seems to be a lot of negativity from the HN crowd about this. But, the reality is that your fellow Americans voted for this. If you don'y like it, you're going to have to convince people that it's a bad idea. Getting worked up about Trump or Musk or SV bros isn't getting us anywhere.

First, Trump voters didn't exactly vote for this, at least not many. Identify politics and owning the libs, sure, but I'd say that a minority of his voters wanted to totally dismantle the administrative state - or if they thought that sounded good, they may not have been aware the repercussions of that on their lives. Second, we all have a right to bitch about what seems like a new America being formed. If things go…

>First, Trump voters didn't exactly vote for this, at least not many.

That's exactly what they voted for. Most people don't trust the govt. Only Trump can be expected to cannibalize the govt.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#928

Post by esalman »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #66

just two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910829 the problems that led to these frauds are structural --no amount of patching the system will fix this. maybe we should consider the possibility that we are due for a refactor, which is often painful, but especially painful for people (or code) with an entrenched incentive to continue existing. i dont mean to defend what the administration is doing but I…

You might be on to something here.

Yes there is structural issue.

When researchers see that appealing to DEI and inclusion make is easy to gain finding for, allegedly, research that is wasteful and not meritorious, everyone will attempt to do it.

Conversely, when appealing to "equality of white people" becomes more likely to get you funded, everyone will also attempt that. Which is going to be the case going forward. If you do not believe me, DJT has appointed someone at the helm of EEO commission who explicitly does this in their LinkedIn bio.

So the issue is structural, it is not dei or white power.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#929

Post by muaytimbo »

avmich wrote: post #899
Facemelters wrote: post #897

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you know what they're talking about, don't play dumb

I don't know. Can you elaborate?

I will elaborate, for the intentionally obtuse and for people who have not lived in the world of academia. When writing NIH grants you typically have a section describing prior foundational work in the field or in the lab itself that the grant proposes to fund.

In our lab, at the time I was there, the majority of our publications were from 2 white and a chinese male. When writing grant proposals to continue this work (to be continued by the same 3 chemists) the gender/racial characteristics of other members of the lab who were female and of other racial backgrounds were described in great detail, even though they had not contributed to the prior work and were not going to continue the project in the future. Our backgrounds were left unmentioned. This was the way to secure funding was what the PI in our lab told me when I inquired about the glaring discrepancy.

It is my opinion that backgrounds should be irrelevant and funding should be granted on the strength of the proposal. That's not the case today.

EDIT: I left academia in 2013, maybe things have changed.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#930

Post by intended »

sporkland wrote: post #836
intended wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a suggestion - at least one of several, which is to understand why we got here. The fact that this is escalating since cable TV, Murdoch, and the internet is not a coincidences. Democracies globally are facing a similar problem, which is an abuse of a core democractic principle: Free speech. Free speech is often valued in and of itself. However, free speech in itself is only a tool that serves a greater purpos…

I like how you analyzed that, one addition: I also think some form of the anthropic principle is at play. The societies that exist have something that allows them to continue to exist. Free speech can allow a society to seek truth and being aligned with reality can be important in the survival of a society. But so can cohesion while being "wrong". There's a lot of information floating around and there's a lot of play…

Read a commentary on the Abram's dissent, where Holmes made the first step toward articulating a "marketplace of ideas".

Holmes was suprisingly nihilistic, and I feel his formation of the search and competition for truth held now idealized beliefs of human behavior.

He accepted that people woudl be driven by their passions and biases, including things like a desire to create cohesion. That this was also something traded as a value and motivating force.

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