So it looks like we're dealing with pretty standard rock. If this stuff was going to be banned without special permitting it is probably a little more risky than a granite kitchen-top counter if someone goes and sits on the road all day. Although this all raises the question of whether granite should be legal as a building material given that people get twitchy about this stuff - I doubt anyone can prove that granite is safe in this context.
It's plausible, but I think the experience thus far is any dust in the lungs is a health risk. Asbestos will not be soon forgotten.
I'd be more worried about testing phosphogypsum's mechanical properties before anyone starts testing the radioactive ones. And danger relative to tyre rubber; although that has probably already been studied somewhere since it is an obvious thing to check.
I expect it to — roads wear down and need resurfacing often enough, and that stuff has to go somewhere, either into the air as dust or dissolved in the rain and run off into the soil.
If this dust is as radioactive as granite dust then its radioactivity is likely not a problem. (breathing in that dust may be a problem despite radioactivity itself not being an issue)
Or maybe I am wrong and breathing in granite dust is more dangerous as it is more radioactive than some other stones?
It is 10 000 times more radioactive - then it likely is a problem.
The question is which one applies. Typical bananas are not dangerously radioactive despite being unusually radioactive for a food product.
Don't know about Florida but oil & gas companies in Pennsylvania regularly dump toxic waste on public roads.
> A Grist review of records from 2019 to 2023 found that oil and gas producers submitted more than 3,000 reports of wastewater dumping to the state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP. In total, they reported spraying nearly 2.4 million gallons of wastewater on Pennsylvania roads. This number is likely a vast undercount: About 86 percent of Pennsylvania’s smaller oil and gas drillers did not report how they disposed of their waste in 2023.
The problem there is- that rubber friction, brings little particles from the road into the air- and you then inhale it. Ingestion and inhalation makes even alpha particles more dangerous. Of course it would be mainly for those living near the roads.
Safe roads are hugely controversial, every time my city talks about speed camera or traffic enforcement, the progressives come up with a huge set of objections.
> Universities are left to defend The Promise of American Higher Education alone.
"Only the federal government can provide the funding needed".?
NSF fields 40,000 proposals per year, 110 per day.
The US is unlike other countries. By design, each state has their own capabilities, and owns everything except that which is specifically provided to the federal government. The combined capabilities of California and Massachusetts equal the remainder of the country. There's nothing to prevent any state from funding the universities in their states.
Was it more convenient before? Sure, but there is now an inflection point where more than 50% of the country "don't like you and wish you weren't here". You don't have to get beat up at the bus stop if you walk or take an uber.
This is hardly unique to research or higher education. All 50 states have negligently constructed budgets to rely on copius federal funding for health care (Medicaid) and education. That makes it easy for a petulant politician to kick sand in your face and "disrupt" that.
States have much less flexible budgets. Many have balanced budget rules. They can't handle downturns. They already rely on the federal government to pick up economic slack.
And if you had the idea that they would be able to raise state taxes with the fat refund checks we'll all be getting with the proceeds of cutting the NSF... there aren't any.
I recommend reading the federalist papers they going your own way on everything is something that is treated with distain. Precisely because number of barriers that would develop between 13 or in our case 50 different states is innumerable imagine you had to have 50 TSAs, and 50 different FAAs, FCCs, FDAs, USDAs instead of 1 each. The solution you seek to poor regulation is not no regulation but Better Regulation (which includes burning some of the bad ones but also includes having replacements)
I think the unpopular but true opinion is that the government is surprising efficient and good at a lot of things. They are not 100% efficient but neither are companies and the private sector at large. There is certainly negations and discussions on where funding should come from but a large part of government success in the USA is that the federal government assumes state debts and gives us the worlds best credit line. This is something that happened 20-30 years after the nation was formed. We abandoned the article's of confederation because they were such a cluster fuck and a horrible way to administer things. The Federalist paper enumerate several huge problems with the state's go it alone approach naming states on the interior basically wouldn't have to fund any military since they could never actually be attacked and it would be unfair to those that would have to, too the point they likely would just not do it and in a time of peril we'd be screwed. But the are several other reasons to not reinvent everything 13 or 50 times.
Also your analogies need work. The idea that the government under previous admin were beating you up at the bus stop with onerous regulation is ironic considering the current admin is literally beating and deporting people at bus stops. I'd argue there is no regulation like the end of a boot.
But also the remedy is childish too, uber is built atop a federal system that established wildly unprofitable networks because they benefit society in non monetary ways. And now that those widely profitable networks exist you can uber instead of taking the bus. But Uber would not exist today if the internet infrastructure took 2-3 longer to get standard convergence because there was no federal body to say we are building the network this way because we are paying for it.
I hope I am no to dismissive either but rather I am highlighting that the idea the states don't do anything isn't really accurate. Because states host all of those federal run agencies. There people manage them the river service isn't run in Hawaii or anyone state but distributed to states who have linked interest in rivers local to them. Its organized by the federal government but run precisely by the people who care and live in those regions.
"There's nothing to prevent any state from funding the universities in their states."
I would've thought one major issue is that a much larger chunk of tax revenue is collected by the IRS than by any state. From googling, CA has the highest state income tax rate but still collects <5% of US federal tax revenue, while having >10% of the population. ~2.5x'ing state taxes to attain similar per-capita revenue would probably lead to a fair number of people leaving the state, or at least get the party who passed that tax hike (presumably Democrats) voted out in the next state election.
OTOH the NSF annual budget is $10B/year, in theory "easily" fundable by CA alone with its $220B/year in tax revenue, in the worst case with a 5% tax increase. The NSF isn't the only federal agency that funds research (seems to provide around 25% of federal research funding) but it is probably enough for one state, even the most productive one. So maybe it really is doable.
I work in Medicaid tech. You’d say it’s negligent for a state to receive federally matched dollars which by the constitution should be touched by the legislature only? Is it negligent to take money matching your own spend, thinking in a lawful regime, only congress could stop the dollars flowing?
The problem inherent in your post is it is not easy for a petulant politician normally, but blatant law breaking, ignoring judges, passing over the separation of powers: this is not “easy”. This is remarkably unusual, for decades republicans spoke of this and nothing happened. Until the fasicism creeps in and the cult of personality takes hold.
So speaking like we should go be 50 of our own countries, reinvent every wheel 50 times, you’re sacrificing massive efficiency and cost saving gains to do so. It’d take someone who doesn’t care for his people to throw a grenade into Medicaid, and the current admin certainly doesn’t care for its people.
Industry determines everything by the impact it will have on its financial state in ninety days. That's it. That's what matters. We redefined competence as the ability to have that financial state be better with regard to nothing else.
Academic research rarely produces anything in 90 days.
Therefore, there will be little in the way of standing for academic research.
Yet somehow, despite strictly speaking only predicting the next token greedily according to the highest probability, LLMs are able to write coherent text across many pages now. Reflecting on why that is the case might give you an answer as to how businesses can plan over the many-year timescale.
"Planning" and "research" are two very, very different things.
I can "plan" to sell off the majority of my company's holdings and give all of the proceeds to shareholders over the next few years. I'd be considered a genius and have a business school somewhere named after me.
Coming up with a hypothesis, testing it, and creating a product/service based off of it with no guarantee of even a penny of monetary return is far riskier, and that's what "research" is.
There are so many obvious counter examples you should be ashamed of yourself. Consider Pratt & Whitney working on geared turbofans for decades, they made that investment privately.
Or consider Tesla, they brought the roadster to market purely off private investment. That’s a lot of r&d for things like battery management systems, motors, and power electronics which took years.
> There are so many obvious counter examples you should be ashamed of yourself. Consider Pratt & Whitney working on geared turbofans for decades, they made that investment privately.
Or consider Tesla, they brought the roadster to market purely off private investment. That’s a lot of r&d for things like battery management systems, motors, and power electronics which took years.
Both happened before the redefinition of competence to making the most money in 90 days. This is a relatively recent shift; and while its roots start in the 1950s, its completion has only happened recently, within the last decade or so.
That’s a tough take but I think fair. There’s also a common thought in industry that nothing gets done in academia (e.g., credentials are often weighed less from a university than from employment). Or at least anecdotally for me.
This is why the human race has approximately zero chances against AI machines of the future. Their plans are not limited by the human life-long timescale.
Advances in computing sciences were not accomplished by investment strategies and nondisclosure agreements. It was accomplished by dedicated professional and academics with the highest levels of integrity and transparency.
So your post comes at a critical time where parties are jumping to the bandwagon of AI.
Transparency is the case, up to a point in research. Many engineering papers I find, have the told you the building blocks of what is required, but they try to avoid stating the secret sauce that binds them together.
Yeah because otherwise you'll have some cloner in China reproducing it the very next day.
Transparency is only working if everyone plays by the same rules, particularly when it comes to patents, and there are a few players who have been getting away with openly sharting on the rules for decades now.
I'm not talking about consumer products, I'm talking about academic research. Most research has no patent attached nor any contents that is patent worthy. Most methods in most papers are based on the very basic building blocks coming from ones fine motor skills.
The fact these methods are omitted has numerous problems. One key issue this provides is reproducibility. All science has to be reproducible and a building block for future science. Omitting key details makes this unfit for purpose.
Secondly, it also means research can not be checked for accuracy and truth, which I do sometimes wonder if thats on purpose. Perhaps they are only presenting the most successful attempt, but not the average situation.
Lastly, this fully goes against the spirit of academic research. I want anyone out there to develop either a brand new usage for my work or adapt and improve my work, either building on it, or finding a new way of doing it that's easier, or more repeatable/reliable. It saves me having to do it, and as I am still working in that field, I will benefit from it.
Computer were invented at a lab funded by the military for applied math, with some guys showing up to run mystery calculations over night when the scientists hired to the project were gone.
Why didn't they get their usual 9-5ers to do the job? Why bother getting the guy who'd published the computing paper in academia in 1936 to come work at Bletchley in 1937?
The academic funding model was long overdue for a change. As others have pointed out, there was no room in the current model for the curiously ambitious scientists, the ones responsible for ground-breaking discoveries. Rather, the bulk of the funding was being secured by careerists and ideologically driven researchers. It's good if those two groups lose interest, science overall will benefit as a result.
Research is inherently risky. If we don't take risks and tackle the big problems, we cannot make progress as a species.
> As others have pointed out, there was no room in the current model for the curiously ambitious scientists, the ones responsible for ground-breaking discoveries.
Who explained this to you? In this thread (I haven't read it all yet)? There's a lot of money in academia for curiously ambitious people just starting their careers so it's an odd thing to say.
And you say "careerist" as if people looking to start a career in research are somehow bad?
I think maybe you have to expand this comment because it's throwing out a lot of negativity without much substance to back it up.
Every genius I met in tech had a story about how they couldn’t get any funding or time to research their own ideas, but had to follow the instructions of some cabal of geezers who control funding in their field.
If you want to look up the age discrimination or age distribution of scientific grants in America. You’ll clearly see that the funding apparatus doesn’t serve early career scientists as well as it did. Accordingly, the government is less valuable and people are correctly perceiving that resources could be better allocated.
It's true that most grant money goes to go to the largest projects, and the largest projects are run by the most well-connected people with the most established research agendas.
But that doesn't mean there isn't money for new researchers who are challenging the establishment. New faculty are afforded a startup package which these days can be in the millions if the research agenda is solid and ambitious.
For those "tech geniuses" who can't get funding, their proposals usually (IME) go like this:
Do you have any experience leading a large research project of the scale you're proposing -- I was a research assistant once, does that count?
Have you ever managed a budget this large? -- I've never seen that much money in my life, no.
What kind of team are you putting together to accomplish this? -- Doing it all myself
What are the risks of failure and how will you mitigate them? -- No risks, I've already accounted for them all with my perfect plan.
Why is your method better than the ones in the literature? -- Those idea are old. My ideas are new and clearly better.
How will your research benefit society? -- Just read the title again, it's self evident.
How will your research benefit your community? -- Why do I even have to articulate this??
What's your long-term funding strategy? -- I figured you'd give me all the money I need, forever.
Funding decision: denied
But when you ask them, they'll tell you: "I wasn't funded because they're a bunch of old geezers who didn't appreciate my genius!"
> There's a lot of money in academia for curiously ambitious people just starting their careers so it's an odd thing to say.
No, there isn't. As a new researcher, if your proposal challenges an established line of reasoning from a prominent source, it is overwhelmingly rejected.
> Who explained it to you?
How rude. My opinion is informed by my extensive personal experience and echoed by those in the thread. Who are you to challenge it?
As they should be. We shouldn't be spending a lot of our very limited and precious funding on counter science.
Some, sure. But if you're not rejecting an overwhelming number of proposals that go against established science, one has to question how established the science really is. How many flat earth researchers should we be funding each year? Or string theorists for that matter?
But you've moved the goalpost, I had responded to this:
> no room in the current model for the curiously ambitious scientists
You said "no room", implying it's not possible. My reply was that actually it's very possible and happens all the time. Is it the common case? No. But in my experience it's quite possible if you have the ability to reasonably articulate a plan. A lot of these "pie in the sky, go against the grain" proposals are also hopefully naive just from a project management and feasibility standpoint. Often times people will get denied funding and feel it's because their idea was just not appreciated, but really it's not the idea but the execution surrounding it that people don't have confidence in.
> How rude. My opinion is informed by my extensive personal experience and echoed by those in the thread.
Please read my reply in the context of your comment; you had not sourced your opinion to yourself; instead you had cited "others have pointed out", so I had wondered who those people were so I could post on their threads. If you had cited your personal experience, I would have taken you at your word.
> Who are you to challenge it?
FWIW, I also have extensive personal experience getting funded for projects which buck traditional norms, so we can kindly put our dicks away. If someone is not getting funded I consider it a persuasive skill issue. Sometimes it's just a luck issue. But lots of people, especially early career researchers, have a good idea but lack the ability to even articulate a clear vision of what their ideas are, and then blame that on others' inability to be persuaded.
While I agree in principle, I feel we output more degrees than industry wants (especially in soft-touch areas), and it could take a while for the market to readjust itself. So much of the research "pipeline" is absolute nonsense it just gets in the way
I was assured on another thread that industry can pick up all the slack, and in fact now that Academica is finally being pushed aside, industry research will take off because they will no longer be worried about the public funding research and therefore will take on the mantle themselves to do basic research.
I hope they are right but my feeling is that this will just leave a big hole that no one wants to fill because it's too not profitable. I guess we will see.
Industry already abandoned that approach 15 years ago. The only basic-research focused lab is Microsoft Research, and even that has seen massive downsizing over the last 2 decades.
Whenever I think about the decline of industrial research labs, not just the most famed like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, but also the labs at companies like Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Intel, and many others, I'm reminded of a quote from Alan Kay about how those who have financially benefited from applying the results of research have often not "given back" to research:
"It strikes me that many of the tech billionaires have already gotten their "upside" many times over from people like Engelbart and other researchers who were supported by ARPA, Parc, ONR, etc. Why would they insist on more upside, and that their money should be an "investment"? That isn't how the great inventions and fundamental technologies were created that eventually gave rise to the wealth that they tapped into after the fact.
"It would be really worth the while of people who do want to make money -- they think in terms of millions and billions -- to understand how the trillions -- those 3 and 4 extra zeros came about that they have tapped into. And to support that process." (from https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/).
Even before Trump's and DOGE's reckless attacks on research and academia, the software industry (I'm going to limit this to the software industry; I don't know the situation in other STEM industries such as health care, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, aerospace, etc.) has changed its strategy regarding funding research. Before the 2010s, many major companies had research labs where its employees worked on medium-term and long-term projects that may not have directly tied into current products but may form the basis of future products. If you had a computer science PhD and worked in an applied field such as systems or compilers, aside from academia and government labs, there were jobs at industrial labs where researchers could work on research systems. Sun, for example, had a lot of interesting research projects such as Self (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(programming_language) ; much of the work on Self influenced the design and implementation of the Java virtual machine). AltaVista, an early Web search engine that predates Google, was originally a research project at Digital Equipment Corporation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista) that was later spun off as its own company.
However, in the 2000s and especially in the 2010s, these jobs became increasingly rare. Having worked in industrial research labs and advanced development teams during the mid-2010s and early 2020s, what I've noticed is a trend away from dedicated research labs where researchers study phenomena and perhaps build prototypes that get passed onto a production team, and more toward a model where researchers are expected to write production code. Google's 2012 paper "Google's Hybrid Approach to Research" (https://research.google/pubs/googles-hybrid-approach-to-rese...) is an excellent summary. This makes a lot of sense under the context of early Google; Google in the 2000s needed to build large-scale distributed systems to power Google's search engine and other operations, but there was little experience within and outside the company on working on such Web-scale systems. Thus, Google hired CS PhDs with research experience in distributed systems and related topics, and then put them to work implementing systems such as MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, and many others. I see a similar mindset when it comes to AI companies such as OpenAI, where researchers directly work on production systems.
Researchers working directly on products that take advantage of research is an effective approach in many situations and it's brought us many innovations, especially in Web-scale systems, big data processing, and machine learning. However, not all research has obvious, direct productization opportunities. For one, not all computer science research is systems-based. There is theoretical computer science research, where researchers are exploring questions that may not immediately lead to new products, but may answer important questions regarding computing. Next, even in systems research, there are areas of research that could be productized a few decades down the road, but in order for those products to be created, the research needs to be done first. Deep neural networks took off once hardware became cheap enough to make DNN architectures feasible, for example. However, without the work done on neural networks in the decades prior to affordable GPUs, research on DNNs would be further behind compared to today.
The biggest problem that I see with attitudes regarding research funding, not just in industry, but also in academia and government, is that funders don't appreciate the fact that research is inherently risky; not all research projects are going to lead to positive results, and the lack of positive results is not a matter of a researcher's work ethic or competence. Funders seem to want sure bets; they seem to only be interested in funding research that has a very high ROI likelihood.
Yes, funders should have the freedom to fund the projects and researchers that they want. There are obvious reasons why funders are more interested in hot topics such as large language models and blockchain applications versus topics where there is less of an obvious likelihood for short-term ROI. However, I feel that it is important to fund less obviously lucrative research efforts. I feel industry is not interested these days in making more speculative bets, kind of like the research projects that Xerox PARC did back in the 1970s.
Academia seems like a natural home for more speculative research. Unfortunately academia has two major pressures that undermine this: (1) the "publish-or-perish" culture found at many major research universities, and (2) fundraising pressures. These two factors, in my opinion, encourage academics, especially pre-tenure and non-tenured ones, to optimize their research pursuits for "sure bets" instead of riskier but potentially higher impact work. The fundraising pressures have gotten much worse now with the abrupt cuts to research funding in the United States.
A long-term solution to this problem requires cultivating a culture that is more understanding of the research process, that research is inherently risky, and that different types of research require different funding mechanisms. I'm all in favor of Google- and OpenAI-style research projects where researchers are directly involved with product-building efforts, but I'm also in favor of other styles of research that are not directly tied to product-building. I also want to see a culture where large corporations and wealthy individuals donate meaningful amounts of money to fund research efforts.
It would be a major setback for society for us to return to the pre-1940s days of "gentlemen scientists" where science and other academic pursuits were only reserved for the independently wealthy and for those who relied on patronage. Modern technological innovations are made possible through research, and it's important that research efforts are funded in a regular manner.
If one altruistically decides to give to society then I'm unsure what outcomes one should expect from society? What's the game-theory here? If one wants something back then who is responsible to get something back?
My canonical example is Linus: if the world was fair he should be worth some pretty big numbers. It is harder to pick what is fair in return for someone's scientific innovation. I would guess Linus has generated as much worth as Microsoft, so in an ideal world he should be worth a Bill Gates. Linus has mostly chosen other non-financial goals to chase (unlike Bill). Linus $50 million, Bill Gates $156 billion.
“While I may not get any money from Linux, I get a huge personal satisfaction from having written something that people really enjoy using.”
“The cyberspace earnings I get from Linux come in the format of having a network of people that know me and trust me, and that I can depend on in return.”
Some people that complain about the wealthy making money are selfishly obsessed about money themselves. Perhaps even hypocritically denegrating others as too-money-focused when others choose to win the money making game.
Unfortunately our world tends to be very focused on financial gains; and often completely ignoring non-financial benefits.
What are the non-financial benefits of an iPhone compared to the money paid for it?
How much is job-enjoyment or job-status worth; compared against either the money earned or the time spent?
> If one altruistically decides to give to society then I'm unsure what outcomes one should expect from society? What's the game-theory here?
I’m not sure if you’re asking rhetorically, but answering your question literally speaking: none. If you’re giving altruistically then you should expect nothing back.
As you point out, many projects whose goal is more personal satisfaction than money-making do indeed generate tremendous value, and in some cases, lots of money too. It’s hard to quantify the value of open source but I would not be surprised if its value exceeded the value of commercial, closed source software.
> I would guess Linus has generated as much worth as Microsoft
Microsoft makes everything from game consoles to ERP systems while Linus created one part of an operating system and a source control system. Linus certainly captured less of the economic value he created than Microsoft’s founders shareholders but Microsoft has generated much, much more (economic) value.
I'm not sure about that. Linux runs effectively the entire internet, as well as the majority of personal computing devices (there are more Android phones out there than Windows PCs and iPhones combined), and everything from rockets to toasters. That's a lot of economic value.
There is tremendous value in git, however you need to take into consideration the fact that 100% of the people and companies who pay GitHub (and thus, generate value for Microsoft) have the option of just using git without GitHub, for $0.
This causes me to think that what these people are actually paying for is GitHub, and not git.
Which causes me to think that, when Microsoft valued Github at over $7.5 billion, that value reflected the value of GitHub sans git.
Linus is in business of advancing the humanity, without making billions in the process. I can only salute him for that.
Git is foundational. GitHub added value by building collaboration tools, UIs, CI/CD integration, and a social coding layer on top of Git. Git is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL v2), which allows anyone to use, modify, and distribute it freely under its terms.
I think to put what you are saying a different way, we have optimized the system to reward ambition at the expense of creativity and curiousity. This rewards careerist scientists over curious ones because the careerist scientist makes all of the safe bets, exploring things that are well known or alternatively exploring things that they think are "hot" and thus will attract funding and citations. I have been in more than one meeting where someone says things like, "uhh, how can we stick digital twins, machine learning, and this lab apparatus i have together? that will be a compelling application." There is no research questions in that statement, no curiousity about the universe, only ambition to attract funding. I don't think ambition is inherently bad, it is a useful trait to have as a scientist. But we have optimized the system to the point where being ambitiously curious does not seem to be rewarded.
I think what you have written here is very well connected to how academia currently functions and disfunctions. Thanks.
I once asked someone at a large Bay-area tech company why they did not invest more in fundamental R&D, and they told me, "We just buy the winners. 'All of Silicon Valley is our research lab'" (the last being, I believe, a quote from their CEO). You don't even need to do it with your own money. Just use debt and equity.
The economist Ha-joon Chang likes to quote the statistic than in the 1950's, companies reinvested 65% of their profits back into growing the business, and today that number stands at 5%. The stock market overall returns more cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends than it raises from investors by selling equity. It is no longer primarily a funding mechanism for companies. It's how investors cash out.
I don't even think it is about making Ph.D's write production code: I support that, as it makes them much more realistic about what is technically feasible (I say as a Ph.D who was written a lot of production code, and has had to work with Ph.D's who haven't). It is that whatever you are doing must be able to be tied directly to near-term revenue. Even just cost-savings is rarely attributed back to the people who created it, because no one wants to give you credit for money they didn't spend. And certainly no one wants to fund something that will not generate a tangible return for 5+ years, or that might not even succeed.
At one point I was asked, as a research Ph.D focused on very low-level software, to come up with subscription-revenue generating product ideas, because "subscription revenue" was the latest buzzword among upper management. They wanted me to build the next TikTok for them. And all I could think was, even if I had the product design talents to be able to do that, in a ZIRP era, why would I build it for you? We are not in that era any longer, but it lasted a long time, and its passing has only made people more near-term focused.
This really hits the nail on the head. I think the extension to this is the all eggs in one (the first) basket approach being exacerbated: it’s always been challenging to conduct foundational research in a field where there already exists a dominant paradigm in industry, but it’s also becoming more and more challenging in academia as well.
> It would be a major setback for society for us to return to the pre-1940s days of "gentlemen scientists" where science and other academic pursuits were only reserved for the independently wealthy and for those who relied on patronage. Modern technological innovations are made possible through research, and it's important that research efforts are funded in a regular manner.
How much of a setback would this really be, though? The US government spent $200 billion of R&D in 2024. Of that $200 billion, $140 billion of it was military related which is probably not in danger. Including private spending, total r&d was around $900 billion. So even if the $60 billion of non-military government research spending was entirely eliminated, that would be only around a 7% decline in spending.
But still that would be bad. That $60 billion is a lot to replace from private funding. I don't know if it would be a net negative, though. It seems like privately funded research can seriously outperform government funding because when private actors fund research, they do it for the specific reason that they want the research done. Contrast this with public funding which has to meet a lot of political goals that have nothing to do with science. Look what SpaceX has been able to accomplish vs NASA. NASA has great scientists and engineers and a much bigger budget than SpaceX did, but the problem is that their rocket building program was more of a jobs program and a way to spread money to a lot of congressional districts than it was about building rockets. Whereas SpaceX had exactly one goal and that was to build rockets.
I also think that it's important to fund research in a regular manner, but is government a more reliable way than private patrons? It feels like its the opposite. If we had a government that really cared about science and committed to funding it in an effective way and never using it as a cover to funnel money to political causes I do think it would be better than relying on private funding, but when I read a list of cancelled grant like this it doesn't seem like we do. https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt...
The are two fundamentally different kinds of private research funding. (Let's drop the &D part, because that's mostly unrelated to the kind of research we are talking about.)
Charitable foundations and similar organizations are not that different from government agencies funding research. They act on a smaller scale, because rich people are not actually that rich.
Then there are companies that do research as part of their business. They are typically much better funded and much narrower in scope than government-funded research. They are also biased towards topics that can be reasonably expected to work and produce economic value within the next 10-20 years. This kind of research is inherently inefficient due to redundant efforts. Instead of making their findings public, companies often keep the results secret, forcing their competitors to waste money on reinventing the wheel.
SpaceX has benefited greatly from public spending - they just had a different operating model. NASA moved to the commercial space program. SpaceX has had many military and government contracts to sustain themselves. Texas offered subsidies for Boca Chica.
SpaceX has received substantial public investment in the form of contracts, infrastructure, and incentives so in essence SpaceX is benefiting the same way that you seem to abhor
What culture you cultivate is just one variable. Go to Japan or Iran or Italy and they will fall over each other, telling you how great their culture was and what it cultivated. When things are relatively stable, it's not hard to lean on the Explore side of the Explore-Exploit tradeoff. When things are ever changing, and at faster and unpredictable rates the tradeoff naturally gets much more complex.
You have to ride the waves. No one really controls them.
>However, in the 2000s and especially in the 2010s, these jobs became increasingly rare.
These jobs became rare because academia took them. The pie may have grown or shrunk a bit but mostly what happened is that instead of running this stuff in house BigCo will sponsor or parter with some university lab or research program.
I haven't crunched the numbers but I suspect that they get better write offs this way.
but I think if you skim the titles you can sense a theme.
Here's the very first one: "Cambio: A Professional Development Approach for Building Latinx-focused Cultural Competence in Informal Science Education Institutions" for a whopping 2.8 million dollars.
This is not basic research, this is not important research, this is left wing politics parasitically attached to scientific institutions.
I wonder how much of this is “don’t hat the player, hate the game.”
As a society, we decided that academics must get funding outside of their department. We also chose that funding bodies liked blockchain for reasons unknown. There is probably a professor somewhere who is working on peer incentives to support education, and realized the work would get funded if they stored the incentives in a blockchain rather than a database. If this professor had stronger professional ethics - someone else would have the same realization.
Is it the professor, the department, or the funding agencies fault?
I used to play on a TinyMUSH server where many of the other players were buddies from back in my college days (early 90s). Despite being "all grown up" we still liked to program toys that did silly things, demonstrating to our peers that we had senses of humor, and parodying the silly academic world around us.
One of my friends designed a toy that was called a "Thesis Generator" and whenever it was activated, it selected various words from a list to create a ridiculous word-salad Master's Thesis title. Honestly, most of its output was more or less believable and less absurd than some of the real theses I've seen, written by real students, and probably even passed peer review.
It seems like the pressure is on both ends, for academics to produce something really novel and tightly-scoped, and so they're going out of their way to find the perfect niche to research, and the academic review team wants to read something really Impressive and Scholarly, and those incentives tend to disconnect them from things like reality and sanity.
Theranos was a great idea. The problem was that they couldn't make it work and they lied about that to everyone involved. That's different from it not being a good idea in the first place.
No it wasn’t. They never promised anything like that.
Theranos technology was the proposition to run smart blood tests on very small volumes of blood drawn from patients on-site. That’s really about it. They couldn’t deliver this service but they never promised any cures, bro.
It was implied which led to fraud convictions. Elizabeth Holmes made misleading claims that gave the impression their technology could revolutionize disease detection and management for example by speaking about a future where people could test themselves regularly and catch disease
The fraud in Theranos for which Holmes et al were ultimately convicted was running regular blood tests (i.e., those any certified lab would run) on samples which were too small so that the blood tests gave essentially random data. Yes, they made much more outlandish claims about what they could eventually do (and at times veered into making those claims about what they could do at the present), but the actual fraud was that they couldn't even do what they were certified to do.
By conducting a throughout literature review over possible methods, consulting the experts, and checking if your proposed method is within laws of physics?
I agree. If Albert Einstein had gone with your sensible approach he could have quickly ruled out his silly idea of relativity as impossible and gone back to his more important work of approving patent applications.
In the case of LLMs I would say that VC funding made the engineering possible. The theoretical breakthroughs were largely made in IBM and Google. OpenAI certainly made some improvements to architecture and training, but ultimately they implemented a refined version of a transformer-based LLM.
This. Even worse: every good idea is the one that looks bad to a layman, otherwise there won't be an opportunity there: if an idea is obviously good, a lot of people already came up with it a long time ago.
Given that the highest-earning income tax bracket's tax rate in the US fell from ~70% to 37% since the 70s, one could argue that VC money used to be taxpayer's money.
Not really. That might pertain to angels but not to VCs. They don't operate with private (individual)owned, post-tax dollars. They are businesses and operate with pre-tax, business money, not even theirs - but bank loans.
1) I have had colleagues get grants cancelled doing basic research (e.g. computer security), no explanation, no DEI, can't get anyone at the NSF to answer questions why.
2) if you don't like the process, change the process. But have a democratically determined process. This is political fiat and the plan is to set up political thought police boards that control final funding decisions based on what the president personally likes.
3) if you like "basic research" and "important research", you must vehemently oppose what is being done to the NIH and NSF. Top researchers are already looking to flee the country, Canada and Europe are offering very nice incentive packages. In weeks, USA went from attracting the best talent around the world, to being radioactive for international researchers. Budgets slashed, the pipeline is being decimated.
4) the point is to crush universities, because that is where dissent is largest, damage to science and research is considered an acceptable side effect.
5) and driving a wedge - in this case "woke" and "DEI" - is exactly how trump and goons get average people to consent, or even support, this decimating of our research apparatus.
Gasp the director of education is investigating how to build a culturally aware science learning in the fastest grow cultural bloc in the US!!!
My second thought was let me sort by a different directorate ahh the stories changes but maybe that's me getting lucky because the biology directorate does hard science. But there is a lot of DEI stuff here why? Because its the grant cancelation statistics after the admin defunded anything with a DEI term. It doesn't represent the totality of NSF funding but an extremely bias sample of it.
The solution to you don't like DEI is to pass laws not just eliminate science research as a whole. Give the NSF time to publish all the canceled programs. Its easier to say you don't like "that research" but than fire your congress person who give the NSF to do "that exact type of research". Not a huge plurality of scientists who did what our nation asked them to do.
The grants were cancelled on the basis of keywords that Trump objects to.
The previous administration wanted many of the same keywords, resulting in projects getting stuffed with them — I saw the same myself 20 years ago, where scientists working with satellite observations of ocean chlorophyll needed to justify their work with e.g. "this will help protect us from terrorists trying to cause an algal bloom".
If the latter is propaganda, the former is censorship.
And what you're using as an example is, essentially, "Huh, this group is acting different. Why?"
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Meta:
2.8 million USD is, what, one small startup for a year or two? It's one of those things that sounds like a lot to a single person, but really isn't.
Also: Do American really say "whopping"? I thought that was a UK tabloid thing.
Exactly. I work on a project that got its grant cancelled and if you looked at the title/proposal and what was actually produced, you'd think there's multiple, huge missing components. We've always had to shape grants to pander a bit (or a lot) to what the people in charge want to fund, this time is different since they're actively taking away funding for doing that with the last guy.
Ah yes, I, too, remember the strategy meetings where we had to pivot everything to defense and terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. One project was pretty routine fertilizer research that we repackaged as “defending against terrorism attacks on the food supply.” I mean, yes, that would be a nice byproduct of quicker and higher yields.
> 2.8 million USD is, what, one small startup for a year or two? It's one of those things that sounds like a lot to a single person, but really isn't.
Yes, and most of it would go to support grad student stipends which are sky high in SF due to COL. If you really look at where this money would flow, it would be to Bay Area landlords.
I don’t have a problem with DEI. Heck, I’ve seen a research paper that ended up with a different perspective and analysis, simply because it had to make a global south to global north comparison.
I am also sure people here can relate to learning about how skin care research is improving for other skin types, now.
Does this mean I think DEI is a magic bullet? no. It isn’t a bogey man to be afraid of either.
From that list, things like “ George Mason University Quantum Education Research Postdoctoral Fellowship” have been nuked.
Having conference posters removed because they use the word “diversity” when discussing human auditory systems, is a level of anti-intellectualism that has torpedoed America’s credibility.
—-
Girls go from being bright, to losing that spark in their eyes around high school.
Amazingly, things aren’t all rosy for men either. Nihilism is the emotion of the era.
These are just infuriating losses of inspiration, talent and motivation in the populace.
ON HN, we’ve talked about UBI. Giving education grants to increase diversity, and to increase the variance of random career walks US children can visualize, is a huge boon. It’s what we expect people to spend their time on if they had the freedom to do so.
I support the argument that more people should go into the trades. They should!
But you are gutting investment into science, and education. You are killing off your future pipeline of experts, and the pain will be felt in 5-10 years, and constantly compound.
Europe is already rolling out the red carpet for experts. They have better labor laws, which will make it even more attractive to set up shop there and have a great life to lead.
American firms will have to find reasons to attract people back, and with a gutted bureaucracy - the US state wont be an attractive factor, it would be something that has to be worked around.
Look at the abstract for that George Mason one and you'll see it's not real science. It doesn't even seem to be science at all but some sort of financial aid for the careers of 3 individuals. Do you really think "convergence approach to quantum education and workforce development research" means something or is just complicated words to hide fraud?
I checked - it’s a fellowship application, here’s some things that you may have missed.
Responsibilities:
- Develops and executes a research program, in collaboration with other fellows; and
- Builds research knowledge and skills through coursework, self-study, and work on existing projects in quantum education research.
Required Qualifications:
- Terminal degree in a related field;
- Must have a PhD & experience with education and/or workforce development programs;
- Must be a US citizen, national, or permanent resident
- Knowledge of data analysis techniques in at least one discipline;
- Excellent written and oral communication skills;
- Ability to work in a collaborative team environment; and
- Ability to work independently.
Preferred Qualifications:
- PhDs can be in STEM disciplines, education, or a field of social science with application to increasing equity and inclusion in STEM education and workforce development;
- Knowledge of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods data analysis as applies to education research data; and
- Knowledge of social science and/or STEM education research methods and how they apply to understanding barriers to success for underrepresented groups in STEM disciplines.
Google: George Mason University is known for its strong programs in economics, computer science, law, public policy, and business.
This is not financial aid, it’s a PHD fellowship. Good lord. On the one side people bemoan the lack of people getting into the hard sciences and the research being done abroad. On the other efforts to increase and understand the issues at home and create actual solutions that bridge exactly these types of conversations, is DEI.
OK, so a fellowship is the government pays you to learn. I didn't know about that system before but it sounds like financial aid with a fancy title. Furthermore, it's not science - the field is education. These fellows weren't part of a pipeline of experts. America isn't in danger of running out of the education part of developing experts, it has no shortage of degreed people.
Very minor nitpick, but “Hispanic serving institution” does have a specific meaning in higher education. He derides it as a pointless statement but it is objectively true with University of Houston.
Why do you think so? Have you read the details? Do you think that collaboration on creating science museums and similar experiences that target kids from specific areas/culture are not important? Or you think that $2.8M (which is basically a few months of funds for the team of 7 in this project) does not convert into higher economic growth down the line from more STEM engagement? Or some other reason?
So far the downvotes were quick, but elaborations on the topic not so much...
Well I think a very strong heuristic is that anyone who uses the term latinx is a race grifter. But that aside, the important point is that these cuts appear to be in stuff that is at least arguably not very scientifically important. I don't see any cuts to studying magnetism or cancer or distant galaxies. Tellingly, the article doesn't say "Oh no Trump is cutting our latinx cultural competency grants!" it is pretending that basic science is being cut and hoping you don't notice. So the article is dishonest and dumb.
If you don't see those cuts, you're not looking for them. Third one I checked was a biology meeting with "Cell Fate and Development" as one of the streams. That's basically... cancer research.
There's lots of "resources and collaboration" entries as well which are a part of people meeting and talking about what they do. Don't expect the title to spell out "Cancer" on any of them.
This is obviously completely bizarre approach for random internet people to pick up titles and judge whether it appropriate topic or not.
First, a majority of the grants listed there are in the EDU Directorate, i.e. devoted to
EDU Programs - Directorate for STEM Education (EDU), which many of the commenters have no clue about.
Second, I looked at the MPS section (mathematical and physical sciences) that I did get grants from in the past:
And here are the cancelled grants. In my opinion these are all sensible topics to be funded (especially since it is probably a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the total budget):
Mathematical Connectivity through Research and Equity for Women
Collaborative Research: Evaluating Access: How a Multi-Institutional Network Promotes Equity and Cultural Change through Expanding Student Voice
Equity Beyond the Algorithm: A Mathematical Quest for Fairer-ness in Machine Learning
Which part of preventing the spread of HIV is "left wing politics"? Or better understanding radiation exposure? Or developing anti-viral countermeasures?
Some $400m of remaining budget for preventing the spread of HIV was cut, and you're saying it's justified because less than $3m went to trying to improve professional development for a specific group of people?
I mean even look at the specific example you picked - $2.8m over 6 years, from 2019 through to an expected end date of 31 August 2025, and they cut the funding on 09 May 2025 - the work has already been paid for and done, and you want to cut funding so you don't even get the final report/publications out of it to, you know, have something of value to show for the money spent?
Absolutely not cherry picking, almost every single one of these has to do with race, diversity, equity etc
“Amplifying Diverse Voices in STEM Education”
“Research Initiation: Long-Term Effect of Involvement in Humanitarian Engineering Projects on Student Professional Formation and Views of Diversity and Inclusion”
“Conference: Future Faculty Workshop: Preparing Diverse Leaders for the Future, Summers of 2022-2025”
“RCN: LEAPS: Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology”
“CAREER: When Two Worlds Collide: An Intersectional Analysis of Black Women's Role Strain and Adaptation in Computing Sciences”
“EAGER: Collaborative Research: Promoting Diverse and Inclusive Leadership in the Geosciences (GOLD-EN)”
It goes on and on like that. Millions of dollars in taxpayer money.
>already been paid for and done, and you want to cut funding so you don't even get the final report/publications out of it
Yes, correct. This is tax payer money funding racist politics. It’s garbage pretend science and this stuff is done spreading.
Finding the ones that aren't DEI-related is difficult. At first I found "CAREER: Understanding the Interdependence of the Microenvironment and Nuclear Organization in Stem Cell Aging" that looks neutral from its title, and the first part of its description was, but then there's this sentence in the middle that sticks out like a sore thumb: "The primary educational objective of this project is to develop a series of stories that focus on introducing concepts of stem cells and genomics to under-represented minority (URM) students in K-3." The rest of the details is neutral, however. It's so unusual that one wonders whether who wrote that was actually pro-DEI, or merely compelled to put in something to that effect in order to appease someone.
Former academic here. That kind of stuff looks within the normal range of a Broader Impacts section. Since the 80s, if you do some obscure fundamental research, then you have to say how it's going to benefit people. Say you think there's a risk that it's not good enough to say "we will understand this natural process and there's a lot of ways that can be carried forward and then that will make it easier to figure out what to research in field X and then maybe that can be used to cure cancer or make guns." And there's always such a risk, with proposal acceptance rates being low. Then you add a sentence about how you'll also educate kids about that thing -- promising to spend a Wednesday afternoon visiting an elementary school sounds like a small price to pay for increasing the acceptance probability of a multi-year grant by 1%.
In the last few years, you had to say something about underrepresented minorities. If your university is in an urban environment where it so happens that the local elementary school is full of URMs, then you don't even need to change anything about your plan.
> The rest of the details is neutral, however. It's so unusual that one wonders whether who wrote that was actually pro-DEI, or merely compelled to put in something to that effect in order to appease someone.
This is how it usually works:
You want public money so you can research your pet interest. But the public wants to know how your research will benefit the public before they will give you public money to do your research. But for some (many) academics, they are loathe to think of anything aside from their direct special interest research topic that they can't even articulate how their research can benefit the public. So they go with the lowest effort idea "I will teach local kids about my subject in a creative way".
Frankly I'm concerned so many people here want to give money to researchers without them having to articulate how it will benefit society. That's what "broader impact" statements are all about.
I just took the first one from the list. The list the article gave. I didn't cherry pick anything. The general theme of the titles of the research grants makes me think that the ones with more innocuous sounding titles are actually just more of the same stuff, just disguised a little better. But I could be wrong. I'd love to see an example of some indisputably important research being cut.
It’s very unclear what point you’re trying to make with the linked article.
First of all, it’s not an example of HIV research, so what could it have to do with links between left wing politics and HIV research?
Second, there isn’t anything “left wing” about the changes to California law made in 2017. It’s not a core tenet of right wing political philosophy that the penalty for knowingly exposing someone to HIV has to be higher than the penalty for knowingly exposing someone to any other communicable disease. It’s entirely possible to hold right wing political views but reject unjust laws passed at the height of homophobic AIDS panic in the 80s.
If you look into the details of prosecutions under the relevant laws, you find that many were patently silly and unjust. For example, HIV positive prostitutes were convicted merely for soliciting, without any evidence that unsafe sex (or indeed any sex at all) had subsequently taken place.
Can you show that the left-wing politics added up to 55% of the NSF's total budget and stretched across all 37 of its directorates? Because those are what's getting cut.
>Can you show that the left-wing politics added up to 55% of the NSF's total budget
55% of academia left-wing and/or marketing to left wing bureaucrats? is that even not possible? that was true in the Reagan era before the Clinton era put it on steroids.
Ok, so show me, using the sources given above and available via the NSF website, that 55% of the NSF's total budget is spent promoting left-wing politics instead of real science.
you are expressing skepticism, so am I, so as far as that goes, we are Even Steven.
I'm older, more experienced (i've heard all your rhetorical tricks before), and I've have been on and understand, true believer, both sides of the political spectrum.
there is no basis for your incredulity, quite the opposite.
so, I'll wait for the evidence you are going to scamper off and find, which you are obligated to do because you have declared that you believe that evidence is important. I have not declared that, I just don't think opinions I disagree with should go unopposed.
Is that your standard here? It has to be 55% to be a problem? If someone working for me diverted 1% of their company budget to political nonsense then that would be their last act as an employee. If you are mandated to spend taxpayer money on science and you spend any of it on garbage like that, you are stealing from the public.
My standard is that the funding cuts have to hit the political nonsense and leave the things that aren't political nonsense. Otherwise I'm going to count them as simple funding cuts, not a crackdown on political nonsense.
> So people with a Latin background are not part of the public?
Hispanic people don't like being called "latinx" so anything with that word in it is pretty much automatically invalidated as being credulent, especially if it is purporting to be helping people when they're colonizing their language.
The person you're responding to is way overplaying their case, though, most of the funding that was cut wasn't DEI related, but let's also be serious people here.
It's language colonization. The correct term, if there is even a need for an alternative for "latino" is "latine", which has existed in Spanish for thousands of years.
"language colonization" sounds pretty woke to me, I think I've lost the plot. I thought we were trying to get rid of woke. Now we are getting rid of "language colonizers" because their terms are wrong?
I thought we were going back to a meritocracy, where people are judged on the merits of their ideas. You read a word and concluded a lot.
It's interesting -- I was in a thread with someone else lamenting it's so hard to get funding if you go against the establishment. Now you're telling me this research shouldn't have been funded because it uses a term that goes against the established term. I think that really highlights the challenges in science funding.
I thought the strategy of skimming titles, mocking them, and then pretending that makes the political killing of research that has been approved by actual scientific bodies through a highly competitive process was discredited and thrown to the bin when it turned out Ozempic was dependent on one of these studies an earlier elected numbnut had publicly mocked in Congress.
I guess I was wrong.
But let’s ignore the idea that random commenter or random politico has a deeper understanding of what makes good research than the highly effective bodies with experts setup to do this. Let’s click the link for the study you actually complained about.
So here’s the first thing I see.
Start Date: Sep 1, 2019
End Date: Aug 31, 2025
Termination Date: May 9, 2025
Assuming equal outlays, you’re saving 4/60 * 2.8mm, so less than about $200k. Well, I guess 200k is a tiny fraction of $2.8mm but I guess that’s still a saving.
Oh wait, what’s this…there’s a link to USASpending.gov which is an official govt site that shows the actual outlays. Thats cool! And I can use the grant ID to see exactly what was done here. Nice!
Oh, so that’s weird. Why does this show an end date of:
Aug 31, 2024!
That was last year!
I’m sure that was a mistake in the official website and the propaganda tool you linked to that supposedly gets its data from here somehow magically corrected that info, so let’s not be hasty and assume they made a chump of you by outright lying to you.
Oh, so it’s not $2.8mm in savings. It’s about $1mm in savings.
But what’s this…we can see the actual transactions.
Of the 4 outlays, the last outlay was made in Aug 2022, and there were no outlays in 2023 or 2024 despite the grant schedule showing all the $2.8mm should have been given out by Aug 2022.
It’s almost like the research, which completed in Aug 2024, didn’t need the entire $2.8mm that was allocated to it, and being legitimate researchers rather than liars and charlatans, only took the money they needed and left the $1mm for the government to use elsewhere.
Looks like the liars and charlatans are the people who created that table to make it look like they saved $2.8mm when in reality they saved $0, and the researches or this study you criticize actually saved the govt $1mm.
There’s no easier chump than someone who wants to be a chump.
That link is from the article. It's the list of the supposedly disastrous grant cuts that are happening, destroying the scientific research pipeline in this country.
America is spending energy and effort to increase the number of scientists to include groups that historically dont see role models and exemplars to follow.
This is a society ensuring it’s getting people to be interested in advanced science. I think thats some of the most noble things a country can do.
Huh? Did you see the list? That's number one. I picked out the least DEI looking one I could from a quick glance and it turned out to include "increase the diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI) of the Biological Physics Community", and "To increase the participation of women and URM scientists at the meeting, we will ...". It's obvious why these grants were terminated. They were DEI ahead of science and the government is working to clean that out.
This post is a great example of whataboutism and distracting people from the big picture: science funding works and has led to a large number of innovations that many of us here on HN use every day.
The original article talks about several of these, including RISC, out-of-order execution, speculative prefetching, vector processing, GPGPU, and multicore.
It's easy to cherry pick and find things that you might personally disagree with. That's true with any system created by us humans. That doesn't mean that you should burn the whole thing down, which is what this administration is doing.
I feel like I've been making the same post over and over on threads like these. NSF-funded research has led to innovations like the above, as well as multibillion dollar companies like Google, Databricks, Duolingo, and more (and that's just in computer science). NSF-funded research has had an incredible Return on Investment in terms of jobs, economic growth, and national security. It took generations to build the American scientific enterprise, and the system has worked incredibly well as is. It's incredibly short-sighted and a massive self-own to destroy something that has advanced the USA and the world so much.
Wait, are you trying to propose a causal relationship between research projects like MK Ultra that happened decades ago and the current administration's targeting universities?
The author is an associate professor at Harvard, so he is going to be biased towards academia.
>knows that our field’s landmark innovations emerged not purely from product roadmaps but from university labs with federal funding
Maybe if you cherry pick those innovations from things coming from university labs. Or count these labs because they openly announced something or popularized something else that already existed.
>The Talent Pipeline Under Threat
Talent can be taught by both AI and industry. University as a place for learning is an outdated concept.
Progress in computing sciences was never accomplished by investment strategies and nondisclosure agreements. It was accomplished by dedicated proffisionals and academics with a high level of integrity and transparency.
So your post seems very appropriate in the current state where all parties are jumping to the AI bandwogen.
"Support for education and research should be as fundamental as clean air or safe roads."
I think the current powers that be hold clean air and safe roads in the same esteem as they hold education and research.
Maybe "Support for education and research should be as fundamental as golf tournaments or Diet Coke" would be a better anology.
Didn't Florida suggest using mining waste for road construction ... the kicker being that it's mildly radioactive?
How mildly?
Background radiation is a thing.
Granite and bananas are a tiny bit more radioactive than typical things, without making them dangerous.
I have absolutely no idea, but it is in interesting question and until someone more cluey can chime in a quick search suggests:
- Florida is using photogypsum - https://www.ijpr.org/npr-news/2023-06-30/florida-moves-forwa...
- Photogypsum in the US is banned if it radiates at >0.4 Bq/g of 226 Ra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphogypsum
- Granite radiates at maybe 450 Bq/kg -> 0.45 Bq/g of 226 Ra. https://www.nature.com/articles/jes200944
So it looks like we're dealing with pretty standard rock. If this stuff was going to be banned without special permitting it is probably a little more risky than a granite kitchen-top counter if someone goes and sits on the road all day. Although this all raises the question of whether granite should be legal as a building material given that people get twitchy about this stuff - I doubt anyone can prove that granite is safe in this context.
Maybe abrasion creating dust to be inhaled by humans makes the difference here.
It's plausible, but I think the experience thus far is any dust in the lungs is a health risk. Asbestos will not be soon forgotten.
I'd be more worried about testing phosphogypsum's mechanical properties before anyone starts testing the radioactive ones. And danger relative to tyre rubber; although that has probably already been studied somewhere since it is an obvious thing to check.
I expect it to — roads wear down and need resurfacing often enough, and that stuff has to go somewhere, either into the air as dust or dissolved in the rain and run off into the soil.
Background radiation isn't the same as breathing in dust.
If this dust is as radioactive as granite dust then its radioactivity is likely not a problem. (breathing in that dust may be a problem despite radioactivity itself not being an issue) Or maybe I am wrong and breathing in granite dust is more dangerous as it is more radioactive than some other stones?
It is 10 000 times more radioactive - then it likely is a problem.
The question is which one applies. Typical bananas are not dangerously radioactive despite being unusually radioactive for a food product.
Don't know about Florida but oil & gas companies in Pennsylvania regularly dump toxic waste on public roads.
> A Grist review of records from 2019 to 2023 found that oil and gas producers submitted more than 3,000 reports of wastewater dumping to the state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP. In total, they reported spraying nearly 2.4 million gallons of wastewater on Pennsylvania roads. This number is likely a vast undercount: About 86 percent of Pennsylvania’s smaller oil and gas drillers did not report how they disposed of their waste in 2023.
https://grist.org/regulation/roadspreading-pennsylvania-frac...
The problem there is- that rubber friction, brings little particles from the road into the air- and you then inhale it. Ingestion and inhalation makes even alpha particles more dangerous. Of course it would be mainly for those living near the roads.
Radioactive asphalt particles keep your lungs trained because otherwise they would get so lazy and stop working properly /s
Safe roads are hugely controversial, every time my city talks about speed camera or traffic enforcement, the progressives come up with a huge set of objections.
> Universities are left to defend The Promise of American Higher Education alone.
"Only the federal government can provide the funding needed".?
NSF fields 40,000 proposals per year, 110 per day.
The US is unlike other countries. By design, each state has their own capabilities, and owns everything except that which is specifically provided to the federal government. The combined capabilities of California and Massachusetts equal the remainder of the country. There's nothing to prevent any state from funding the universities in their states.
Was it more convenient before? Sure, but there is now an inflection point where more than 50% of the country "don't like you and wish you weren't here". You don't have to get beat up at the bus stop if you walk or take an uber.
This is hardly unique to research or higher education. All 50 states have negligently constructed budgets to rely on copius federal funding for health care (Medicaid) and education. That makes it easy for a petulant politician to kick sand in your face and "disrupt" that.
States have much less flexible budgets. Many have balanced budget rules. They can't handle downturns. They already rely on the federal government to pick up economic slack.
And if you had the idea that they would be able to raise state taxes with the fat refund checks we'll all be getting with the proceeds of cutting the NSF... there aren't any.
I recommend reading the federalist papers they going your own way on everything is something that is treated with distain. Precisely because number of barriers that would develop between 13 or in our case 50 different states is innumerable imagine you had to have 50 TSAs, and 50 different FAAs, FCCs, FDAs, USDAs instead of 1 each. The solution you seek to poor regulation is not no regulation but Better Regulation (which includes burning some of the bad ones but also includes having replacements)
I think the unpopular but true opinion is that the government is surprising efficient and good at a lot of things. They are not 100% efficient but neither are companies and the private sector at large. There is certainly negations and discussions on where funding should come from but a large part of government success in the USA is that the federal government assumes state debts and gives us the worlds best credit line. This is something that happened 20-30 years after the nation was formed. We abandoned the article's of confederation because they were such a cluster fuck and a horrible way to administer things. The Federalist paper enumerate several huge problems with the state's go it alone approach naming states on the interior basically wouldn't have to fund any military since they could never actually be attacked and it would be unfair to those that would have to, too the point they likely would just not do it and in a time of peril we'd be screwed. But the are several other reasons to not reinvent everything 13 or 50 times.
Also your analogies need work. The idea that the government under previous admin were beating you up at the bus stop with onerous regulation is ironic considering the current admin is literally beating and deporting people at bus stops. I'd argue there is no regulation like the end of a boot.
But also the remedy is childish too, uber is built atop a federal system that established wildly unprofitable networks because they benefit society in non monetary ways. And now that those widely profitable networks exist you can uber instead of taking the bus. But Uber would not exist today if the internet infrastructure took 2-3 longer to get standard convergence because there was no federal body to say we are building the network this way because we are paying for it.
I hope I am no to dismissive either but rather I am highlighting that the idea the states don't do anything isn't really accurate. Because states host all of those federal run agencies. There people manage them the river service isn't run in Hawaii or anyone state but distributed to states who have linked interest in rivers local to them. Its organized by the federal government but run precisely by the people who care and live in those regions.
"There's nothing to prevent any state from funding the universities in their states."
I would've thought one major issue is that a much larger chunk of tax revenue is collected by the IRS than by any state. From googling, CA has the highest state income tax rate but still collects <5% of US federal tax revenue, while having >10% of the population. ~2.5x'ing state taxes to attain similar per-capita revenue would probably lead to a fair number of people leaving the state, or at least get the party who passed that tax hike (presumably Democrats) voted out in the next state election.
OTOH the NSF annual budget is $10B/year, in theory "easily" fundable by CA alone with its $220B/year in tax revenue, in the worst case with a 5% tax increase. The NSF isn't the only federal agency that funds research (seems to provide around 25% of federal research funding) but it is probably enough for one state, even the most productive one. So maybe it really is doable.
I work in Medicaid tech. You’d say it’s negligent for a state to receive federally matched dollars which by the constitution should be touched by the legislature only? Is it negligent to take money matching your own spend, thinking in a lawful regime, only congress could stop the dollars flowing?
The problem inherent in your post is it is not easy for a petulant politician normally, but blatant law breaking, ignoring judges, passing over the separation of powers: this is not “easy”. This is remarkably unusual, for decades republicans spoke of this and nothing happened. Until the fasicism creeps in and the cult of personality takes hold.
So speaking like we should go be 50 of our own countries, reinvent every wheel 50 times, you’re sacrificing massive efficiency and cost saving gains to do so. It’d take someone who doesn’t care for his people to throw a grenade into Medicaid, and the current admin certainly doesn’t care for its people.
Industry determines everything by the impact it will have on its financial state in ninety days. That's it. That's what matters. We redefined competence as the ability to have that financial state be better with regard to nothing else.
Academic research rarely produces anything in 90 days.
Therefore, there will be little in the way of standing for academic research.
Yet somehow, despite strictly speaking only predicting the next token greedily according to the highest probability, LLMs are able to write coherent text across many pages now. Reflecting on why that is the case might give you an answer as to how businesses can plan over the many-year timescale.
"Planning" and "research" are two very, very different things.
I can "plan" to sell off the majority of my company's holdings and give all of the proceeds to shareholders over the next few years. I'd be considered a genius and have a business school somewhere named after me.
Coming up with a hypothesis, testing it, and creating a product/service based off of it with no guarantee of even a penny of monetary return is far riskier, and that's what "research" is.
There are so many obvious counter examples you should be ashamed of yourself. Consider Pratt & Whitney working on geared turbofans for decades, they made that investment privately.
Or consider Tesla, they brought the roadster to market purely off private investment. That’s a lot of r&d for things like battery management systems, motors, and power electronics which took years.
> There are so many obvious counter examples you should be ashamed of yourself. Consider Pratt & Whitney working on geared turbofans for decades, they made that investment privately. Or consider Tesla, they brought the roadster to market purely off private investment. That’s a lot of r&d for things like battery management systems, motors, and power electronics which took years.
Both happened before the redefinition of competence to making the most money in 90 days. This is a relatively recent shift; and while its roots start in the 1950s, its completion has only happened recently, within the last decade or so.
Pratt and Whitney brought their geared turbo fan to market in 2019 and Tesla brought the roadster to market in 2008.
Meta’s investment in oculus also defies a 90 day payback period edict.
That’s a tough take but I think fair. There’s also a common thought in industry that nothing gets done in academia (e.g., credentials are often weighed less from a university than from employment). Or at least anecdotally for me.
This is why the human race has approximately zero chances against AI machines of the future. Their plans are not limited by the human life-long timescale.
Yep.
Better bet for mankind at this point is for Europe or China to take up that research mantle.
(Actually, maybe best bet is for both to take up the mantle?)
Advances in computing sciences were not accomplished by investment strategies and nondisclosure agreements. It was accomplished by dedicated professional and academics with the highest levels of integrity and transparency. So your post comes at a critical time where parties are jumping to the bandwagon of AI.
Where do you have integrity and transparency from? They were of all kinds.
Transparency is the case, up to a point in research. Many engineering papers I find, have the told you the building blocks of what is required, but they try to avoid stating the secret sauce that binds them together.
Yeah because otherwise you'll have some cloner in China reproducing it the very next day.
Transparency is only working if everyone plays by the same rules, particularly when it comes to patents, and there are a few players who have been getting away with openly sharting on the rules for decades now.
I'm not talking about consumer products, I'm talking about academic research. Most research has no patent attached nor any contents that is patent worthy. Most methods in most papers are based on the very basic building blocks coming from ones fine motor skills.
The fact these methods are omitted has numerous problems. One key issue this provides is reproducibility. All science has to be reproducible and a building block for future science. Omitting key details makes this unfit for purpose.
Secondly, it also means research can not be checked for accuracy and truth, which I do sometimes wonder if thats on purpose. Perhaps they are only presenting the most successful attempt, but not the average situation.
Lastly, this fully goes against the spirit of academic research. I want anyone out there to develop either a brand new usage for my work or adapt and improve my work, either building on it, or finding a new way of doing it that's easier, or more repeatable/reliable. It saves me having to do it, and as I am still working in that field, I will benefit from it.
Computer were invented at a lab funded by the military for applied math, with some guys showing up to run mystery calculations over night when the scientists hired to the project were gone.
Why didn't they get their usual 9-5ers to do the job? Why bother getting the guy who'd published the computing paper in academia in 1936 to come work at Bletchley in 1937?
The academic funding model was long overdue for a change. As others have pointed out, there was no room in the current model for the curiously ambitious scientists, the ones responsible for ground-breaking discoveries. Rather, the bulk of the funding was being secured by careerists and ideologically driven researchers. It's good if those two groups lose interest, science overall will benefit as a result.
Research is inherently risky. If we don't take risks and tackle the big problems, we cannot make progress as a species.
> As others have pointed out, there was no room in the current model for the curiously ambitious scientists, the ones responsible for ground-breaking discoveries.
Who explained this to you? In this thread (I haven't read it all yet)? There's a lot of money in academia for curiously ambitious people just starting their careers so it's an odd thing to say.
And you say "careerist" as if people looking to start a career in research are somehow bad?
I think maybe you have to expand this comment because it's throwing out a lot of negativity without much substance to back it up.
Every genius I met in tech had a story about how they couldn’t get any funding or time to research their own ideas, but had to follow the instructions of some cabal of geezers who control funding in their field.
If you want to look up the age discrimination or age distribution of scientific grants in America. You’ll clearly see that the funding apparatus doesn’t serve early career scientists as well as it did. Accordingly, the government is less valuable and people are correctly perceiving that resources could be better allocated.
It's true that most grant money goes to go to the largest projects, and the largest projects are run by the most well-connected people with the most established research agendas.
But that doesn't mean there isn't money for new researchers who are challenging the establishment. New faculty are afforded a startup package which these days can be in the millions if the research agenda is solid and ambitious.
For those "tech geniuses" who can't get funding, their proposals usually (IME) go like this:
Funding decision: deniedBut when you ask them, they'll tell you: "I wasn't funded because they're a bunch of old geezers who didn't appreciate my genius!"
> There's a lot of money in academia for curiously ambitious people just starting their careers so it's an odd thing to say.
No, there isn't. As a new researcher, if your proposal challenges an established line of reasoning from a prominent source, it is overwhelmingly rejected.
> Who explained it to you?
How rude. My opinion is informed by my extensive personal experience and echoed by those in the thread. Who are you to challenge it?
> overwhelmingly rejected.
As they should be. We shouldn't be spending a lot of our very limited and precious funding on counter science.
Some, sure. But if you're not rejecting an overwhelming number of proposals that go against established science, one has to question how established the science really is. How many flat earth researchers should we be funding each year? Or string theorists for that matter?
But you've moved the goalpost, I had responded to this:
> no room in the current model for the curiously ambitious scientists
You said "no room", implying it's not possible. My reply was that actually it's very possible and happens all the time. Is it the common case? No. But in my experience it's quite possible if you have the ability to reasonably articulate a plan. A lot of these "pie in the sky, go against the grain" proposals are also hopefully naive just from a project management and feasibility standpoint. Often times people will get denied funding and feel it's because their idea was just not appreciated, but really it's not the idea but the execution surrounding it that people don't have confidence in.
> How rude. My opinion is informed by my extensive personal experience and echoed by those in the thread.
Please read my reply in the context of your comment; you had not sourced your opinion to yourself; instead you had cited "others have pointed out", so I had wondered who those people were so I could post on their threads. If you had cited your personal experience, I would have taken you at your word.
> Who are you to challenge it?
FWIW, I also have extensive personal experience getting funded for projects which buck traditional norms, so we can kindly put our dicks away. If someone is not getting funded I consider it a persuasive skill issue. Sometimes it's just a luck issue. But lots of people, especially early career researchers, have a good idea but lack the ability to even articulate a clear vision of what their ideas are, and then blame that on others' inability to be persuaded.
While I agree in principle, I feel we output more degrees than industry wants (especially in soft-touch areas), and it could take a while for the market to readjust itself. So much of the research "pipeline" is absolute nonsense it just gets in the way
Why do people expect industry to do anything but look after itself? It would be very uncharacteristic of capital to make a stand.
I was assured on another thread that industry can pick up all the slack, and in fact now that Academica is finally being pushed aside, industry research will take off because they will no longer be worried about the public funding research and therefore will take on the mantle themselves to do basic research.
I hope they are right but my feeling is that this will just leave a big hole that no one wants to fill because it's too not profitable. I guess we will see.
Industry already abandoned that approach 15 years ago. The only basic-research focused lab is Microsoft Research, and even that has seen massive downsizing over the last 2 decades.
Whenever I think about the decline of industrial research labs, not just the most famed like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, but also the labs at companies like Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Intel, and many others, I'm reminded of a quote from Alan Kay about how those who have financially benefited from applying the results of research have often not "given back" to research:
"It strikes me that many of the tech billionaires have already gotten their "upside" many times over from people like Engelbart and other researchers who were supported by ARPA, Parc, ONR, etc. Why would they insist on more upside, and that their money should be an "investment"? That isn't how the great inventions and fundamental technologies were created that eventually gave rise to the wealth that they tapped into after the fact.
"It would be really worth the while of people who do want to make money -- they think in terms of millions and billions -- to understand how the trillions -- those 3 and 4 extra zeros came about that they have tapped into. And to support that process." (from https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/).
Even before Trump's and DOGE's reckless attacks on research and academia, the software industry (I'm going to limit this to the software industry; I don't know the situation in other STEM industries such as health care, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, aerospace, etc.) has changed its strategy regarding funding research. Before the 2010s, many major companies had research labs where its employees worked on medium-term and long-term projects that may not have directly tied into current products but may form the basis of future products. If you had a computer science PhD and worked in an applied field such as systems or compilers, aside from academia and government labs, there were jobs at industrial labs where researchers could work on research systems. Sun, for example, had a lot of interesting research projects such as Self (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(programming_language) ; much of the work on Self influenced the design and implementation of the Java virtual machine). AltaVista, an early Web search engine that predates Google, was originally a research project at Digital Equipment Corporation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista) that was later spun off as its own company.
However, in the 2000s and especially in the 2010s, these jobs became increasingly rare. Having worked in industrial research labs and advanced development teams during the mid-2010s and early 2020s, what I've noticed is a trend away from dedicated research labs where researchers study phenomena and perhaps build prototypes that get passed onto a production team, and more toward a model where researchers are expected to write production code. Google's 2012 paper "Google's Hybrid Approach to Research" (https://research.google/pubs/googles-hybrid-approach-to-rese...) is an excellent summary. This makes a lot of sense under the context of early Google; Google in the 2000s needed to build large-scale distributed systems to power Google's search engine and other operations, but there was little experience within and outside the company on working on such Web-scale systems. Thus, Google hired CS PhDs with research experience in distributed systems and related topics, and then put them to work implementing systems such as MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, and many others. I see a similar mindset when it comes to AI companies such as OpenAI, where researchers directly work on production systems.
Researchers working directly on products that take advantage of research is an effective approach in many situations and it's brought us many innovations, especially in Web-scale systems, big data processing, and machine learning. However, not all research has obvious, direct productization opportunities. For one, not all computer science research is systems-based. There is theoretical computer science research, where researchers are exploring questions that may not immediately lead to new products, but may answer important questions regarding computing. Next, even in systems research, there are areas of research that could be productized a few decades down the road, but in order for those products to be created, the research needs to be done first. Deep neural networks took off once hardware became cheap enough to make DNN architectures feasible, for example. However, without the work done on neural networks in the decades prior to affordable GPUs, research on DNNs would be further behind compared to today.
The biggest problem that I see with attitudes regarding research funding, not just in industry, but also in academia and government, is that funders don't appreciate the fact that research is inherently risky; not all research projects are going to lead to positive results, and the lack of positive results is not a matter of a researcher's work ethic or competence. Funders seem to want sure bets; they seem to only be interested in funding research that has a very high ROI likelihood.
Yes, funders should have the freedom to fund the projects and researchers that they want. There are obvious reasons why funders are more interested in hot topics such as large language models and blockchain applications versus topics where there is less of an obvious likelihood for short-term ROI. However, I feel that it is important to fund less obviously lucrative research efforts. I feel industry is not interested these days in making more speculative bets, kind of like the research projects that Xerox PARC did back in the 1970s.
Academia seems like a natural home for more speculative research. Unfortunately academia has two major pressures that undermine this: (1) the "publish-or-perish" culture found at many major research universities, and (2) fundraising pressures. These two factors, in my opinion, encourage academics, especially pre-tenure and non-tenured ones, to optimize their research pursuits for "sure bets" instead of riskier but potentially higher impact work. The fundraising pressures have gotten much worse now with the abrupt cuts to research funding in the United States.
A long-term solution to this problem requires cultivating a culture that is more understanding of the research process, that research is inherently risky, and that different types of research require different funding mechanisms. I'm all in favor of Google- and OpenAI-style research projects where researchers are directly involved with product-building efforts, but I'm also in favor of other styles of research that are not directly tied to product-building. I also want to see a culture where large corporations and wealthy individuals donate meaningful amounts of money to fund research efforts.
It would be a major setback for society for us to return to the pre-1940s days of "gentlemen scientists" where science and other academic pursuits were only reserved for the independently wealthy and for those who relied on patronage. Modern technological innovations are made possible through research, and it's important that research efforts are funded in a regular manner.
If one altruistically decides to give to society then I'm unsure what outcomes one should expect from society? What's the game-theory here? If one wants something back then who is responsible to get something back?
My canonical example is Linus: if the world was fair he should be worth some pretty big numbers. It is harder to pick what is fair in return for someone's scientific innovation. I would guess Linus has generated as much worth as Microsoft, so in an ideal world he should be worth a Bill Gates. Linus has mostly chosen other non-financial goals to chase (unlike Bill). Linus $50 million, Bill Gates $156 billion.
Some people that complain about the wealthy making money are selfishly obsessed about money themselves. Perhaps even hypocritically denegrating others as too-money-focused when others choose to win the money making game.Unfortunately our world tends to be very focused on financial gains; and often completely ignoring non-financial benefits.
What are the non-financial benefits of an iPhone compared to the money paid for it?
How much is job-enjoyment or job-status worth; compared against either the money earned or the time spent?
> If one altruistically decides to give to society then I'm unsure what outcomes one should expect from society? What's the game-theory here?
I’m not sure if you’re asking rhetorically, but answering your question literally speaking: none. If you’re giving altruistically then you should expect nothing back.
As you point out, many projects whose goal is more personal satisfaction than money-making do indeed generate tremendous value, and in some cases, lots of money too. It’s hard to quantify the value of open source but I would not be surprised if its value exceeded the value of commercial, closed source software.
> I would guess Linus has generated as much worth as Microsoft
Microsoft makes everything from game consoles to ERP systems while Linus created one part of an operating system and a source control system. Linus certainly captured less of the economic value he created than Microsoft’s founders shareholders but Microsoft has generated much, much more (economic) value.
I'm not sure about that. Linux runs effectively the entire internet, as well as the majority of personal computing devices (there are more Android phones out there than Windows PCs and iPhones combined), and everything from rockets to toasters. That's a lot of economic value.
Well, I'll pick a similar counterexample then.
Microsoft valued Github at over $7.5 billion in stock at acquisition.
git was developed by Linus, subsequently generating economic value for Microsoft.
What was git worth economically? Did Microsoft pay Linus for any of the value it received?
There is tremendous value in git, however you need to take into consideration the fact that 100% of the people and companies who pay GitHub (and thus, generate value for Microsoft) have the option of just using git without GitHub, for $0.
This causes me to think that what these people are actually paying for is GitHub, and not git.
Which causes me to think that, when Microsoft valued Github at over $7.5 billion, that value reflected the value of GitHub sans git.
Linus is in business of advancing the humanity, without making billions in the process. I can only salute him for that.
Git is foundational. GitHub added value by building collaboration tools, UIs, CI/CD integration, and a social coding layer on top of Git. Git is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL v2), which allows anyone to use, modify, and distribute it freely under its terms.
It’s an infrastructure that others build on.
I think to put what you are saying a different way, we have optimized the system to reward ambition at the expense of creativity and curiousity. This rewards careerist scientists over curious ones because the careerist scientist makes all of the safe bets, exploring things that are well known or alternatively exploring things that they think are "hot" and thus will attract funding and citations. I have been in more than one meeting where someone says things like, "uhh, how can we stick digital twins, machine learning, and this lab apparatus i have together? that will be a compelling application." There is no research questions in that statement, no curiousity about the universe, only ambition to attract funding. I don't think ambition is inherently bad, it is a useful trait to have as a scientist. But we have optimized the system to the point where being ambitiously curious does not seem to be rewarded.
I think what you have written here is very well connected to how academia currently functions and disfunctions. Thanks.
I once asked someone at a large Bay-area tech company why they did not invest more in fundamental R&D, and they told me, "We just buy the winners. 'All of Silicon Valley is our research lab'" (the last being, I believe, a quote from their CEO). You don't even need to do it with your own money. Just use debt and equity.
The economist Ha-joon Chang likes to quote the statistic than in the 1950's, companies reinvested 65% of their profits back into growing the business, and today that number stands at 5%. The stock market overall returns more cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends than it raises from investors by selling equity. It is no longer primarily a funding mechanism for companies. It's how investors cash out.
I don't even think it is about making Ph.D's write production code: I support that, as it makes them much more realistic about what is technically feasible (I say as a Ph.D who was written a lot of production code, and has had to work with Ph.D's who haven't). It is that whatever you are doing must be able to be tied directly to near-term revenue. Even just cost-savings is rarely attributed back to the people who created it, because no one wants to give you credit for money they didn't spend. And certainly no one wants to fund something that will not generate a tangible return for 5+ years, or that might not even succeed.
At one point I was asked, as a research Ph.D focused on very low-level software, to come up with subscription-revenue generating product ideas, because "subscription revenue" was the latest buzzword among upper management. They wanted me to build the next TikTok for them. And all I could think was, even if I had the product design talents to be able to do that, in a ZIRP era, why would I build it for you? We are not in that era any longer, but it lasted a long time, and its passing has only made people more near-term focused.
This really hits the nail on the head. I think the extension to this is the all eggs in one (the first) basket approach being exacerbated: it’s always been challenging to conduct foundational research in a field where there already exists a dominant paradigm in industry, but it’s also becoming more and more challenging in academia as well.
> It would be a major setback for society for us to return to the pre-1940s days of "gentlemen scientists" where science and other academic pursuits were only reserved for the independently wealthy and for those who relied on patronage. Modern technological innovations are made possible through research, and it's important that research efforts are funded in a regular manner.
How much of a setback would this really be, though? The US government spent $200 billion of R&D in 2024. Of that $200 billion, $140 billion of it was military related which is probably not in danger. Including private spending, total r&d was around $900 billion. So even if the $60 billion of non-military government research spending was entirely eliminated, that would be only around a 7% decline in spending.
But still that would be bad. That $60 billion is a lot to replace from private funding. I don't know if it would be a net negative, though. It seems like privately funded research can seriously outperform government funding because when private actors fund research, they do it for the specific reason that they want the research done. Contrast this with public funding which has to meet a lot of political goals that have nothing to do with science. Look what SpaceX has been able to accomplish vs NASA. NASA has great scientists and engineers and a much bigger budget than SpaceX did, but the problem is that their rocket building program was more of a jobs program and a way to spread money to a lot of congressional districts than it was about building rockets. Whereas SpaceX had exactly one goal and that was to build rockets.
I also think that it's important to fund research in a regular manner, but is government a more reliable way than private patrons? It feels like its the opposite. If we had a government that really cared about science and committed to funding it in an effective way and never using it as a cover to funnel money to political causes I do think it would be better than relying on private funding, but when I read a list of cancelled grant like this it doesn't seem like we do. https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt...
The are two fundamentally different kinds of private research funding. (Let's drop the &D part, because that's mostly unrelated to the kind of research we are talking about.)
Charitable foundations and similar organizations are not that different from government agencies funding research. They act on a smaller scale, because rich people are not actually that rich.
Then there are companies that do research as part of their business. They are typically much better funded and much narrower in scope than government-funded research. They are also biased towards topics that can be reasonably expected to work and produce economic value within the next 10-20 years. This kind of research is inherently inefficient due to redundant efforts. Instead of making their findings public, companies often keep the results secret, forcing their competitors to waste money on reinventing the wheel.
SpaceX has benefited greatly from public spending - they just had a different operating model. NASA moved to the commercial space program. SpaceX has had many military and government contracts to sustain themselves. Texas offered subsidies for Boca Chica.
SpaceX has received substantial public investment in the form of contracts, infrastructure, and incentives so in essence SpaceX is benefiting the same way that you seem to abhor
What culture you cultivate is just one variable. Go to Japan or Iran or Italy and they will fall over each other, telling you how great their culture was and what it cultivated. When things are relatively stable, it's not hard to lean on the Explore side of the Explore-Exploit tradeoff. When things are ever changing, and at faster and unpredictable rates the tradeoff naturally gets much more complex.
You have to ride the waves. No one really controls them.
>However, in the 2000s and especially in the 2010s, these jobs became increasingly rare.
These jobs became rare because academia took them. The pie may have grown or shrunk a bit but mostly what happened is that instead of running this stuff in house BigCo will sponsor or parter with some university lab or research program.
I haven't crunched the numbers but I suspect that they get better write offs this way.
I didn't look at every one on the list of these 1000 NSF grants that were cancelled:
https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt...
but I think if you skim the titles you can sense a theme.
Here's the very first one: "Cambio: A Professional Development Approach for Building Latinx-focused Cultural Competence in Informal Science Education Institutions" for a whopping 2.8 million dollars.
This is not basic research, this is not important research, this is left wing politics parasitically attached to scientific institutions.
Besides the usual DEI stuff, some of those titles sound like the output of a stochastic generator trained on buzzwords:
"HSI Implementation and Evaluation Project: Using Peer-Enhanced Blockchain-Based Learning Environments to Promote Student Engagement and Retention"
"Blockchain-Based Learning Environments". That's my WTF of the day.
I wonder how much of this is “don’t hat the player, hate the game.”
As a society, we decided that academics must get funding outside of their department. We also chose that funding bodies liked blockchain for reasons unknown. There is probably a professor somewhere who is working on peer incentives to support education, and realized the work would get funded if they stored the incentives in a blockchain rather than a database. If this professor had stronger professional ethics - someone else would have the same realization.
Is it the professor, the department, or the funding agencies fault?
> Is it the professor, the department, or the funding agencies fault?
Like so many things that are being turned upside down nowadays, I think the author already answers it:
> Before we go any further, let me be clear: this isn’t about […] ideologies.
The author did not give arguments for this claim.
I used to play on a TinyMUSH server where many of the other players were buddies from back in my college days (early 90s). Despite being "all grown up" we still liked to program toys that did silly things, demonstrating to our peers that we had senses of humor, and parodying the silly academic world around us.
One of my friends designed a toy that was called a "Thesis Generator" and whenever it was activated, it selected various words from a list to create a ridiculous word-salad Master's Thesis title. Honestly, most of its output was more or less believable and less absurd than some of the real theses I've seen, written by real students, and probably even passed peer review.
It seems like the pressure is on both ends, for academics to produce something really novel and tightly-scoped, and so they're going out of their way to find the perfect niche to research, and the academic review team wants to read something really Impressive and Scholarly, and those incentives tend to disconnect them from things like reality and sanity.
You do realize VCs were putting billions into this shit a few years ago right?
Maybe DOGE should have shut down YCombinator.
VCs also put lots of money into Theranos, it doesn’t make it a good idea.
Theranos was a great idea. The problem was that they couldn't make it work and they lied about that to everyone involved. That's different from it not being a good idea in the first place.
Theranos wasn’t a great idea or even a good idea. The “idea” was
1. Get a drop of blood 2. … 3. Cure all diseases
That’s not even an idea. It’s just magical thinking.
No it wasn’t. They never promised anything like that.
Theranos technology was the proposition to run smart blood tests on very small volumes of blood drawn from patients on-site. That’s really about it. They couldn’t deliver this service but they never promised any cures, bro.
It was implied which led to fraud convictions. Elizabeth Holmes made misleading claims that gave the impression their technology could revolutionize disease detection and management for example by speaking about a future where people could test themselves regularly and catch disease
The fraud in Theranos for which Holmes et al were ultimately convicted was running regular blood tests (i.e., those any certified lab would run) on samples which were too small so that the blood tests gave essentially random data. Yes, they made much more outlandish claims about what they could eventually do (and at times veered into making those claims about what they could do at the present), but the actual fraud was that they couldn't even do what they were certified to do.
A good idea is an idea that possible to turn into reality, else it is just an idea.
How do you know if you can or cannot turn the idea into reality without trying?
By conducting a throughout literature review over possible methods, consulting the experts, and checking if your proposed method is within laws of physics?
I agree. If Albert Einstein had gone with your sensible approach he could have quickly ruled out his silly idea of relativity as impossible and gone back to his more important work of approving patent applications.
Venture capital is not a good way to fund theoretical work. And Einstein didn't lie about his achievements.
That there could be useful LLMs was theoretically argued about; essentially VC funding answered what wasn’t happening in academia.
In the case of LLMs I would say that VC funding made the engineering possible. The theoretical breakthroughs were largely made in IBM and Google. OpenAI certainly made some improvements to architecture and training, but ultimately they implemented a refined version of a transformer-based LLM.
But that's what venture capital and research should be about, financing ideas to see if they can be realized.
I mean, the people who put money into Theranos later should have done better due diligence, but I don't fault the initial investment.
This. Even worse: every good idea is the one that looks bad to a layman, otherwise there won't be an opportunity there: if an idea is obviously good, a lot of people already came up with it a long time ago.
Fortunately, VCs weren't doing that with taxpayer's money.
Given that the highest-earning income tax bracket's tax rate in the US fell from ~70% to 37% since the 70s, one could argue that VC money used to be taxpayer's money.
Nice visualisation here: https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/personal-finance/hi...
Not really. That might pertain to angels but not to VCs. They don't operate with private (individual)owned, post-tax dollars. They are businesses and operate with pre-tax, business money, not even theirs - but bank loans.
Wow. You’ve radicalized me. This is almost beyond parody.
1) I have had colleagues get grants cancelled doing basic research (e.g. computer security), no explanation, no DEI, can't get anyone at the NSF to answer questions why.
2) if you don't like the process, change the process. But have a democratically determined process. This is political fiat and the plan is to set up political thought police boards that control final funding decisions based on what the president personally likes.
3) if you like "basic research" and "important research", you must vehemently oppose what is being done to the NIH and NSF. Top researchers are already looking to flee the country, Canada and Europe are offering very nice incentive packages. In weeks, USA went from attracting the best talent around the world, to being radioactive for international researchers. Budgets slashed, the pipeline is being decimated.
4) the point is to crush universities, because that is where dissent is largest, damage to science and research is considered an acceptable side effect.
5) and driving a wedge - in this case "woke" and "DEI" - is exactly how trump and goons get average people to consent, or even support, this decimating of our research apparatus.
Gasp the director of education is investigating how to build a culturally aware science learning in the fastest grow cultural bloc in the US!!!
My second thought was let me sort by a different directorate ahh the stories changes but maybe that's me getting lucky because the biology directorate does hard science. But there is a lot of DEI stuff here why? Because its the grant cancelation statistics after the admin defunded anything with a DEI term. It doesn't represent the totality of NSF funding but an extremely bias sample of it.
The solution to you don't like DEI is to pass laws not just eliminate science research as a whole. Give the NSF time to publish all the canceled programs. Its easier to say you don't like "that research" but than fire your congress person who give the NSF to do "that exact type of research". Not a huge plurality of scientists who did what our nation asked them to do.
The grants were cancelled on the basis of keywords that Trump objects to.
The previous administration wanted many of the same keywords, resulting in projects getting stuffed with them — I saw the same myself 20 years ago, where scientists working with satellite observations of ocean chlorophyll needed to justify their work with e.g. "this will help protect us from terrorists trying to cause an algal bloom".
If the latter is propaganda, the former is censorship.
And what you're using as an example is, essentially, "Huh, this group is acting different. Why?"
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Meta:
2.8 million USD is, what, one small startup for a year or two? It's one of those things that sounds like a lot to a single person, but really isn't.
Also: Do American really say "whopping"? I thought that was a UK tabloid thing.
Exactly. I work on a project that got its grant cancelled and if you looked at the title/proposal and what was actually produced, you'd think there's multiple, huge missing components. We've always had to shape grants to pander a bit (or a lot) to what the people in charge want to fund, this time is different since they're actively taking away funding for doing that with the last guy.
Ah yes, I, too, remember the strategy meetings where we had to pivot everything to defense and terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. One project was pretty routine fertilizer research that we repackaged as “defending against terrorism attacks on the food supply.” I mean, yes, that would be a nice byproduct of quicker and higher yields.
> 2.8 million USD is, what, one small startup for a year or two? It's one of those things that sounds like a lot to a single person, but really isn't.
Yes, and most of it would go to support grad student stipends which are sky high in SF due to COL. If you really look at where this money would flow, it would be to Bay Area landlords.
I don’t have a problem with DEI. Heck, I’ve seen a research paper that ended up with a different perspective and analysis, simply because it had to make a global south to global north comparison.
I am also sure people here can relate to learning about how skin care research is improving for other skin types, now.
Does this mean I think DEI is a magic bullet? no. It isn’t a bogey man to be afraid of either.
From that list, things like “ George Mason University Quantum Education Research Postdoctoral Fellowship” have been nuked.
Having conference posters removed because they use the word “diversity” when discussing human auditory systems, is a level of anti-intellectualism that has torpedoed America’s credibility.
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Girls go from being bright, to losing that spark in their eyes around high school.
Amazingly, things aren’t all rosy for men either. Nihilism is the emotion of the era.
These are just infuriating losses of inspiration, talent and motivation in the populace.
ON HN, we’ve talked about UBI. Giving education grants to increase diversity, and to increase the variance of random career walks US children can visualize, is a huge boon. It’s what we expect people to spend their time on if they had the freedom to do so.
I support the argument that more people should go into the trades. They should!
But you are gutting investment into science, and education. You are killing off your future pipeline of experts, and the pain will be felt in 5-10 years, and constantly compound.
Europe is already rolling out the red carpet for experts. They have better labor laws, which will make it even more attractive to set up shop there and have a great life to lead.
American firms will have to find reasons to attract people back, and with a gutted bureaucracy - the US state wont be an attractive factor, it would be something that has to be worked around.
Look at the abstract for that George Mason one and you'll see it's not real science. It doesn't even seem to be science at all but some sort of financial aid for the careers of 3 individuals. Do you really think "convergence approach to quantum education and workforce development research" means something or is just complicated words to hide fraud?
I checked - it’s a fellowship application, here’s some things that you may have missed.
Responsibilities:
- Develops and executes a research program, in collaboration with other fellows; and
- Builds research knowledge and skills through coursework, self-study, and work on existing projects in quantum education research.
Required Qualifications:
- Terminal degree in a related field;
- Must have a PhD & experience with education and/or workforce development programs;
- Must be a US citizen, national, or permanent resident
- Knowledge of data analysis techniques in at least one discipline;
- Excellent written and oral communication skills;
- Ability to work in a collaborative team environment; and
- Ability to work independently.
Preferred Qualifications:
- PhDs can be in STEM disciplines, education, or a field of social science with application to increasing equity and inclusion in STEM education and workforce development;
- Knowledge of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods data analysis as applies to education research data; and
- Knowledge of social science and/or STEM education research methods and how they apply to understanding barriers to success for underrepresented groups in STEM disciplines.
Google: George Mason University is known for its strong programs in economics, computer science, law, public policy, and business.
This is not financial aid, it’s a PHD fellowship. Good lord. On the one side people bemoan the lack of people getting into the hard sciences and the research being done abroad. On the other efforts to increase and understand the issues at home and create actual solutions that bridge exactly these types of conversations, is DEI.
OK, so a fellowship is the government pays you to learn. I didn't know about that system before but it sounds like financial aid with a fancy title. Furthermore, it's not science - the field is education. These fellows weren't part of a pipeline of experts. America isn't in danger of running out of the education part of developing experts, it has no shortage of degreed people.
More in-depth analysis from Scott Alexander: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-w...
Very minor nitpick, but “Hispanic serving institution” does have a specific meaning in higher education. He derides it as a pointless statement but it is objectively true with University of Houston.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic-Serving_Institution
> this is not important research
Why do you think so? Have you read the details? Do you think that collaboration on creating science museums and similar experiences that target kids from specific areas/culture are not important? Or you think that $2.8M (which is basically a few months of funds for the team of 7 in this project) does not convert into higher economic growth down the line from more STEM engagement? Or some other reason?
So far the downvotes were quick, but elaborations on the topic not so much...
Well I think a very strong heuristic is that anyone who uses the term latinx is a race grifter. But that aside, the important point is that these cuts appear to be in stuff that is at least arguably not very scientifically important. I don't see any cuts to studying magnetism or cancer or distant galaxies. Tellingly, the article doesn't say "Oh no Trump is cutting our latinx cultural competency grants!" it is pretending that basic science is being cut and hoping you don't notice. So the article is dishonest and dumb.
If you don't see those cuts, you're not looking for them. Third one I checked was a biology meeting with "Cell Fate and Development" as one of the streams. That's basically... cancer research.
There's lots of "resources and collaboration" entries as well which are a part of people meeting and talking about what they do. Don't expect the title to spell out "Cancer" on any of them.
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This is obviously completely bizarre approach for random internet people to pick up titles and judge whether it appropriate topic or not.
First, a majority of the grants listed there are in the EDU Directorate, i.e. devoted to EDU Programs - Directorate for STEM Education (EDU), which many of the commenters have no clue about.
Second, I looked at the MPS section (mathematical and physical sciences) that I did get grants from in the past:
And here are the cancelled grants. In my opinion these are all sensible topics to be funded (especially since it is probably a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the total budget):
Mathematical Connectivity through Research and Equity for Women
Collaborative Research: Evaluating Access: How a Multi-Institutional Network Promotes Equity and Cultural Change through Expanding Student Voice
Equity Beyond the Algorithm: A Mathematical Quest for Fairer-ness in Machine Learning
Collaborative Research: Conference: Mathematical Sciences Institutes Diversity Initiative
Advancing Inclusive Leaders in Astronomy
Collaborative Research: Conference: Mathematical Sciences Institutes Diversity Initiative
Pathways to a Diverse STEM Workforce: GEM Underrepresented Minority Internships in STEM Program
CAREER: From Equivariant Chromatic Homotopy Theory to Phases of Matter: Voyage to the Edge
Collaborative Research: Conference: Mathematical Sciences Institutes Diversity Initiative
Collaborative Research: Evaluating Access: How a Multi-Institutional Network Promotes Equity and Cultural Change through Expanding Student Voice
Quantum Noir: A conference series focused on Faculty, Researchers, and Students of Color(+) in the Quantum Sciences
Minnesota Partnership to Foster Native American Participation in Astrophysics
Conference: Gender Equity in the Mathematical Study (GEMS) of Commutative Algebra
Conference: 2025 Stochastic Physics in Biology GRC
Conference in Geometry, Topology, and Dynamics: Celebrating the Work of Diverse Mathematicians
Collaborative Research: Conference: Mathematical Sciences Institutes Diversity Initiative
Postdoctoral Fellowship: MPS-Ascend: Probing Secondary Structure and Hydration in Nucleic Acids Using Chiral
Selective Vibrational Sum Frequency Generation Spectroscopy PRIMES: Researching and Teaching Mathematics of Fairness and Equity
Collaborative Research: ATD: Hawkes Process-Based Causal Relationship Discovery For Complex Threat Detection and Forecasting
Preparation of Stimuli-Responsive Materials with Directed Photophysical Behavior
This is some serious cherry-picking at work.
Look at the NIH grants listed, which by dollar value far outweigh the NSF grants listed: https://grant-watch.us/nih-data.html
Which part of preventing the spread of HIV is "left wing politics"? Or better understanding radiation exposure? Or developing anti-viral countermeasures?
Some $400m of remaining budget for preventing the spread of HIV was cut, and you're saying it's justified because less than $3m went to trying to improve professional development for a specific group of people?
I mean even look at the specific example you picked - $2.8m over 6 years, from 2019 through to an expected end date of 31 August 2025, and they cut the funding on 09 May 2025 - the work has already been paid for and done, and you want to cut funding so you don't even get the final report/publications out of it to, you know, have something of value to show for the money spent?
Absolutely not cherry picking, almost every single one of these has to do with race, diversity, equity etc
“Amplifying Diverse Voices in STEM Education”
“Research Initiation: Long-Term Effect of Involvement in Humanitarian Engineering Projects on Student Professional Formation and Views of Diversity and Inclusion”
“Conference: Future Faculty Workshop: Preparing Diverse Leaders for the Future, Summers of 2022-2025”
“RCN: LEAPS: Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology”
“CAREER: When Two Worlds Collide: An Intersectional Analysis of Black Women's Role Strain and Adaptation in Computing Sciences”
“EAGER: Collaborative Research: Promoting Diverse and Inclusive Leadership in the Geosciences (GOLD-EN)”
It goes on and on like that. Millions of dollars in taxpayer money.
>already been paid for and done, and you want to cut funding so you don't even get the final report/publications out of it
Yes, correct. This is tax payer money funding racist politics. It’s garbage pretend science and this stuff is done spreading.
Finding the ones that aren't DEI-related is difficult. At first I found "CAREER: Understanding the Interdependence of the Microenvironment and Nuclear Organization in Stem Cell Aging" that looks neutral from its title, and the first part of its description was, but then there's this sentence in the middle that sticks out like a sore thumb: "The primary educational objective of this project is to develop a series of stories that focus on introducing concepts of stem cells and genomics to under-represented minority (URM) students in K-3." The rest of the details is neutral, however. It's so unusual that one wonders whether who wrote that was actually pro-DEI, or merely compelled to put in something to that effect in order to appease someone.
Former academic here. That kind of stuff looks within the normal range of a Broader Impacts section. Since the 80s, if you do some obscure fundamental research, then you have to say how it's going to benefit people. Say you think there's a risk that it's not good enough to say "we will understand this natural process and there's a lot of ways that can be carried forward and then that will make it easier to figure out what to research in field X and then maybe that can be used to cure cancer or make guns." And there's always such a risk, with proposal acceptance rates being low. Then you add a sentence about how you'll also educate kids about that thing -- promising to spend a Wednesday afternoon visiting an elementary school sounds like a small price to pay for increasing the acceptance probability of a multi-year grant by 1%.
In the last few years, you had to say something about underrepresented minorities. If your university is in an urban environment where it so happens that the local elementary school is full of URMs, then you don't even need to change anything about your plan.
> The rest of the details is neutral, however. It's so unusual that one wonders whether who wrote that was actually pro-DEI, or merely compelled to put in something to that effect in order to appease someone.
This is how it usually works:
You want public money so you can research your pet interest. But the public wants to know how your research will benefit the public before they will give you public money to do your research. But for some (many) academics, they are loathe to think of anything aside from their direct special interest research topic that they can't even articulate how their research can benefit the public. So they go with the lowest effort idea "I will teach local kids about my subject in a creative way".
Frankly I'm concerned so many people here want to give money to researchers without them having to articulate how it will benefit society. That's what "broader impact" statements are all about.
> It’s garbage pretend science
The scientists are not to blame for the appalling incentives of the grant system here.
Wait a few years and we'll get the same thing again except the titles of the bad science will be:
* An economic analysis of rehoming manufacturing to underepresented states
* a study of price inelasticity of Greenlander's real estate?
* benefits of the politically disenfranchised attacking the senate as compared to archaic senate law making.
And for the people who get that money, guess who they will be voting for and donating to political campaigns for, etc.
"Always look for the hidden agenda."
I just took the first one from the list. The list the article gave. I didn't cherry pick anything. The general theme of the titles of the research grants makes me think that the ones with more innocuous sounding titles are actually just more of the same stuff, just disguised a little better. But I could be wrong. I'd love to see an example of some indisputably important research being cut.
And I dunno if you're being pollyannish or what but HIV research is often very tied up in left wing politics. It may or may not be in this case. For example: https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-california-law-r...
It’s very unclear what point you’re trying to make with the linked article.
First of all, it’s not an example of HIV research, so what could it have to do with links between left wing politics and HIV research?
Second, there isn’t anything “left wing” about the changes to California law made in 2017. It’s not a core tenet of right wing political philosophy that the penalty for knowingly exposing someone to HIV has to be higher than the penalty for knowingly exposing someone to any other communicable disease. It’s entirely possible to hold right wing political views but reject unjust laws passed at the height of homophobic AIDS panic in the 80s.
If you look into the details of prosecutions under the relevant laws, you find that many were patently silly and unjust. For example, HIV positive prostitutes were convicted merely for soliciting, without any evidence that unsafe sex (or indeed any sex at all) had subsequently taken place.
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/HI...
Can you show that the left-wing politics added up to 55% of the NSF's total budget and stretched across all 37 of its directorates? Because those are what's getting cut.
>Can you show that the left-wing politics added up to 55% of the NSF's total budget
55% of academia left-wing and/or marketing to left wing bureaucrats? is that even not possible? that was true in the Reagan era before the Clinton era put it on steroids.
Ok, so show me, using the sources given above and available via the NSF website, that 55% of the NSF's total budget is spent promoting left-wing politics instead of real science.
>Ok, so show me...
no, you show me the opposite.
you are expressing skepticism, so am I, so as far as that goes, we are Even Steven.
I'm older, more experienced (i've heard all your rhetorical tricks before), and I've have been on and understand, true believer, both sides of the political spectrum.
there is no basis for your incredulity, quite the opposite.
so, I'll wait for the evidence you are going to scamper off and find, which you are obligated to do because you have declared that you believe that evidence is important. I have not declared that, I just don't think opinions I disagree with should go unopposed.
I'll wait...
> you believe that evidence is important. I have not declared that
If you wanna believe government rationales for their actions until proven otherwise, you go ahead with that.
Sucker.
Is that your standard here? It has to be 55% to be a problem? If someone working for me diverted 1% of their company budget to political nonsense then that would be their last act as an employee. If you are mandated to spend taxpayer money on science and you spend any of it on garbage like that, you are stealing from the public.
My standard is that the funding cuts have to hit the political nonsense and leave the things that aren't political nonsense. Otherwise I'm going to count them as simple funding cuts, not a crackdown on political nonsense.
So people with a Latin background are not part of the public?
> So people with a Latin background are not part of the public?
Hispanic people don't like being called "latinx" so anything with that word in it is pretty much automatically invalidated as being credulent, especially if it is purporting to be helping people when they're colonizing their language.
The person you're responding to is way overplaying their case, though, most of the funding that was cut wasn't DEI related, but let's also be serious people here.
I don't think it's so cut and dry.
Moreover you're assuming a lot from just a title.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx#Among_US_Hispanics/Lati...
It's language colonization. The correct term, if there is even a need for an alternative for "latino" is "latine", which has existed in Spanish for thousands of years.
"language colonization" sounds pretty woke to me, I think I've lost the plot. I thought we were trying to get rid of woke. Now we are getting rid of "language colonizers" because their terms are wrong?
I thought we were going back to a meritocracy, where people are judged on the merits of their ideas. You read a word and concluded a lot.
It's interesting -- I was in a thread with someone else lamenting it's so hard to get funding if you go against the establishment. Now you're telling me this research shouldn't have been funded because it uses a term that goes against the established term. I think that really highlights the challenges in science funding.
I thought the strategy of skimming titles, mocking them, and then pretending that makes the political killing of research that has been approved by actual scientific bodies through a highly competitive process was discredited and thrown to the bin when it turned out Ozempic was dependent on one of these studies an earlier elected numbnut had publicly mocked in Congress.
I guess I was wrong.
But let’s ignore the idea that random commenter or random politico has a deeper understanding of what makes good research than the highly effective bodies with experts setup to do this. Let’s click the link for the study you actually complained about.
So here’s the first thing I see.
Start Date: Sep 1, 2019 End Date: Aug 31, 2025 Termination Date: May 9, 2025
Assuming equal outlays, you’re saving 4/60 * 2.8mm, so less than about $200k. Well, I guess 200k is a tiny fraction of $2.8mm but I guess that’s still a saving.
Oh wait, what’s this…there’s a link to USASpending.gov which is an official govt site that shows the actual outlays. Thats cool! And I can use the grant ID to see exactly what was done here. Nice!
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_1906595_4900
Oh, so that’s weird. Why does this show an end date of:
Aug 31, 2024!
That was last year!
I’m sure that was a mistake in the official website and the propaganda tool you linked to that supposedly gets its data from here somehow magically corrected that info, so let’s not be hasty and assume they made a chump of you by outright lying to you.
But what’s this. It gives actual amounts.
> Outlayed Amount $1,795,710.00 Obligated Amount $2,821,709.00
Oh, so it’s not $2.8mm in savings. It’s about $1mm in savings.
But what’s this…we can see the actual transactions.
Of the 4 outlays, the last outlay was made in Aug 2022, and there were no outlays in 2023 or 2024 despite the grant schedule showing all the $2.8mm should have been given out by Aug 2022.
It’s almost like the research, which completed in Aug 2024, didn’t need the entire $2.8mm that was allocated to it, and being legitimate researchers rather than liars and charlatans, only took the money they needed and left the $1mm for the government to use elsewhere.
Looks like the liars and charlatans are the people who created that table to make it look like they saved $2.8mm when in reality they saved $0, and the researches or this study you criticize actually saved the govt $1mm.
There’s no easier chump than someone who wants to be a chump.
That link is from the article. It's the list of the supposedly disastrous grant cuts that are happening, destroying the scientific research pipeline in this country.
America is spending energy and effort to increase the number of scientists to include groups that historically dont see role models and exemplars to follow.
This is a society ensuring it’s getting people to be interested in advanced science. I think thats some of the most noble things a country can do.
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Huh? Did you see the list? That's number one. I picked out the least DEI looking one I could from a quick glance and it turned out to include "increase the diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI) of the Biological Physics Community", and "To increase the participation of women and URM scientists at the meeting, we will ...". It's obvious why these grants were terminated. They were DEI ahead of science and the government is working to clean that out.
This post is a great example of whataboutism and distracting people from the big picture: science funding works and has led to a large number of innovations that many of us here on HN use every day.
The original article talks about several of these, including RISC, out-of-order execution, speculative prefetching, vector processing, GPGPU, and multicore.
It's easy to cherry pick and find things that you might personally disagree with. That's true with any system created by us humans. That doesn't mean that you should burn the whole thing down, which is what this administration is doing.
I feel like I've been making the same post over and over on threads like these. NSF-funded research has led to innovations like the above, as well as multibillion dollar companies like Google, Databricks, Duolingo, and more (and that's just in computer science). NSF-funded research has had an incredible Return on Investment in terms of jobs, economic growth, and national security. It took generations to build the American scientific enterprise, and the system has worked incredibly well as is. It's incredibly short-sighted and a massive self-own to destroy something that has advanced the USA and the world so much.
Did you look at the linked list? This is the opposite of cherry picking, nearly 100% of these grants are absurd.
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Academia and higher education have been central to some unsavory initiatives by federal agencies.
The tendency to remain (or appear) willfully ignorant of those while clutching pearls over funding cuts is frankly repugnant.
Wait, are you trying to propose a causal relationship between research projects like MK Ultra that happened decades ago and the current administration's targeting universities?
The author is an associate professor at Harvard, so he is going to be biased towards academia.
>knows that our field’s landmark innovations emerged not purely from product roadmaps but from university labs with federal funding
Maybe if you cherry pick those innovations from things coming from university labs. Or count these labs because they openly announced something or popularized something else that already existed.
>The Talent Pipeline Under Threat
Talent can be taught by both AI and industry. University as a place for learning is an outdated concept.
Progress in computing sciences was never accomplished by investment strategies and nondisclosure agreements. It was accomplished by dedicated proffisionals and academics with a high level of integrity and transparency. So your post seems very appropriate in the current state where all parties are jumping to the AI bandwogen.