The post war scientific edifice is being shattered in a monumental act of vandalism.
It’s not just defunding childhood cancer research, but also dismantling the very idea of agency in the broader society. Science and basic research are worth pursuing. And the cost is a pittance.
This reminds me of something Alan Kay (of Xerox PARC and Apple fame) wrote when talked about how those who profited from the results of research have not “paid it forward” through funding future research:
“As I pointed out in a previous email, Engelbart couldn't get funding from the very people who made fortunes from his inventions.
“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.”
No, this isn't about oligarchs. This is about sadists some of whom happen to be oligarchs whose singular goal is to make the non-MAGA sad. It is working.
it is of course not about that, maga could give two shits who is happy or sad. the whole exercise is too do silly shit in public to make people “outraged” while privately commiting the greatest heist in the history of the universe :)
What blows my mind is how short sighted it is. Even the oligarchs benefit from scientific research. Even the oligarchs lose money when our industries move to other countries.
How do we know what projects are worth funding? Anything that labels itself science? Is sociology science and basic research? Do we fund people instead of projects? How do you get in the group?
These grants are competitively reviewed by experts in their fields, and are quite hard to get. Even twenty years ago getting an NIH R01 was considered an important career accomplishment.
Now, as to the topics being funded, the broad strokes are set by Congress, which is why much of the funding goes to medical research since pretty much everyone likes the idea of better treatments for things like cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. If there was an entire field they considered unnecessary, the legal process would be working with Congress to either remove it entirely or put in restrictions. They aren’t doing that, of course, because that would force people to actually go on the record voting for something specific and that usually exposes that “junk science” claims are deceptive.
I can’t read between the lines you’re drawing. Are you trying to say that unless we can make perfectly efficient funding decisions, we should fund nothing?
If a research topic is obviously valuable, the industry is probably already working on it. Academic research mostly deals with topics where the benefits are too unpredictable or too far in the future to make sense for the industry. But many of those topics eventually become valuable – you just don't know in advance which ones.
I think you wait a few decades and you have thousands of people using their full brain power and attention to continue to secure that funding. And not just money - but a continuing affirmation that their work is valuable.
> you just don't know in advance which ones.
at the limit, this sounds like “you can’t question what’s good science because it’s unknowable, but it’s also a moral imperative to fund” which leads back to my original question. If that’s true, which projects and fields get to forgoe scrutiny in hopes of paying off?
It's fundamentally no different from what VCs are doing, except the timescales are longer. You expect that most startups are going to fail but some are going to be really successful. Because you can't predict the outcomes in advance, you fund a large number of startups, hoping to catch the successful ones. There are some heuristics that should help you pick the winners. Or at least you hope so. But you also know there is a real chance that your intuition is wrong and the heuristics just make your choices worse.
> Shouldn’t we be asking a similar question? Which research projects are going to deliver insight and value for the public?
Yes, we’ve always done that - and quite extensively. I would recommend learning more about this process: it’s run by people who care deeply about scientific progress - nobody gets into it for the low pay - and if there seems to be a simple improvement, the odds are high that someone made it in the previous century.
I have a number of friends and family members who are academics and they spend a lot of time on each grant explaining how their research will advance our scientific understanding and linking it to other benefits (e.g. low-level neuroscience isn’t going to lead to new medical treatments directly but it provides the foundational knowledge which those treatments are based on).
Echoing the peer comment, if you were to pick any flaw it’s that we probably spend too much money on betting relative to the savings. There’s a lot of good research which doesn’t get funded, so it’s not hard to fill your budget every year with qualified proposals.
All of that can be true, and yet there are simultaneously so many papers and projects that are not worthwhile being funded. How does our university system exist in the current set? Where is the money coming from?
> they spend a lot of time on each grant explaining how their research will advance our scientific understanding and linking it to other benefits
Do those come true? Or is this just an exercise in diligence.
> I would recommend learning more about this process
You’re right. I should learn more. I really want to understand.
Writing a grant application typically takes weeks of full time work, split between the prospective PI, their collaborators and trainees, and administrators. When the funding agency receives the application, there is administrative vetting to ensure that the application meets all formal requirements. Then there is vetting by internal and external experts, who evaluate the application for both scientific merit and whatever other values politicians happen to prioritize at the moment. If it looks like that the grant will be awarded (typical success rates are 20-25%), there is further administrative vetting to ensure compliance with various regulations. And this entire process typically takes anything from a year to a year and a half.
If anything, the process is inefficient, because there is too much vetting. Especially considering how small the individual grants are.
You’re telling me we know it’s quality because there are hoops to jump through to get the funding. But shouldn’t the results tell us that? Do we have a list of the most recent successes from these grants?
In your view, the government should’ve not funded the research that resulted in, say, the internet, because who could’ve known it would be valuable before it was done? Is that right?
Then there’s this weirdly pervasive (on the political right) attack on researchers that supposes they’re all just out for funding, damn the actual science. Is that a reflection of your values, projected on people you don’t know? Is it in actual, widespread evidence? Are you just begging the question for fun?
These are basically nonsensical objections that, I’m guessing, have no basis in reality as no evidence is given. There are a whole lot of listed studies available - it seems like it would be easy to find examples of things that shouldn’t be funded.
> In your view, the government should’ve not funded the research that resulted in, say, the internet
No. I’m saying just because things had unforeseen value in the past does not mean we should not scrutinize which projects we fund.
In other words, having bad prospects for utility or success is not a virtue.
The limit of that argument is that anything and everything deserves funding because it might be useful even if its prospects look terrible.
> These are basically nonsensical objections
What’s nonsensical is to say funding science means good things happen, not funding science means bad things happen. What’s science? I don’t know. Everything from particle physics, to elementary school surveys.
> What’s nonsensical is to say funding science means good things happen, not funding science means bad things happen. What’s science? I don’t know. Everything from particle physics, to elementary school surveys.
I think, in aggregate, it’s trivially true that funding science results in good things happening. I think if there are specific studies that appear valueless, they could be assessed for future potential outcomes, wherein “we don’t know” is a viable and not unvaluable answer.
I don’t think anyone disagrees that there’s value in oversight, they , and I, just disagree that not knowing, right now, the future outcomes isn’t really indicative of anything and is not a comment on the presence or absence of that future value.
> it’s trivially true that funding science results in good things happening
It’s trivially true in that you’ve defined science to mean “good and valuable research”.
Let’s make that more concrete. What qualifies as science and what’s not with funding. Is doing a survey about whether having the color red in a classroom helps student performance, science?
“Concern” may be the best single term for the downfall of civilization. It’s not that anyone’s doing anything wrong, it’s that there is concern that there could be someone doing something wrong, so best to hit the self destruct button.
We all do. But that’s not concern. Tell me something specific and I’ll agree or disagree. Tell me you are concerned in some abstract sense and I’ll accuse you of trying to get the outcome you want without presenting any reasonable argument.
> Moreover what kind of habit of thought are you in that being called out for that is read as vitriol?
That’s as much a matter of personal identity as a ‘habit of thought’, friend. Otherwise, we could we comment on the basis of _your_ perspective as some mutable affectation, no?
You see, we are shadows of ourselves. An inquisitive play, or let’s say a “judgment” about Cuda economics: aspirational, errant? Then, the linguistic phalanx: honed no doubt by long running needs to be heard and seen and listened to.
Awesome news! I'm glad for the workers and their families. That is a great wage and one that will pay dividends in terms of their health and the health of their communities.
Just to follow this slippery slope: are all increases in worker pay since, say, the pay freezes in the middle Roman Empire followed by just inflation, with no other socioeconomic benefits?
In my particular use-case, I'm using a set of local dev tools hosted as a homebrew tap.
The build looks up the github tar.gz release for each tag and commits the sha256sum of that file to the formula
What's odd is that all the _historical_ tags have broken release shasums. Does this mean the entire set of zip/tar.gz archives has been rebuilt? That could be a problem, as perhaps you cannot easily back out of this change...
They never really stored them, they were always generated by some code (maybe with a cache layer in front). The code changed in a way that changed the bytes in the tar.gz without affecting their contents-when-extracted.
The trick here is that a Github release is in essence simply a tag of a specific commit. There is no need to build archives in advance, as they can be dynamically generated from the git repo.
However, if you change the compression algorithm used to generate the archive, it'll result in a different checksum! The content is the same, but the archive is not.
Pretty bizarre this ever was stable in the first place.
Unfortunately for this kind of service you need to actively fiddle with the bytes to prevent people from relying on an implementation detail like this and prevent them from digging you into a too big to fail api stability hole.
That's my thought as well. They could also potentially retroactively generate the source tarballs using the old method for every possible repository/tag on Github, store it, and serve that, and then only generate it on-demand for new tags, but I doubt they'll do that. They might though, given this is what led to the problem in the first place (ie; the on-demand generation vs generating on push+storing).
That seems wasteful. Many projects do not actively advertise the GitHub tag downloads, and instead have their own stored and stable tarballs (or other distributions). And I suppose many users of those auto-generated downloads don’t care about their checksums.
Who should pay for this? The developer of the project might not care about the stability, but the maintainers of the various Linux distros might. Should the developer pay from their own pocket to make the Linux folks happy? Should there be some pool of all the Linux distros to collect the fees and pay for these projects?
I think of it as a fitness measure: Are you active enough at moving towards food gathering sites, preparing and surveying the landscape, creating and fine tuning your tools? If it is an approval of sorts on behalf of the child, then it also points to some really basic learning that is beginning to flow between the parent and child
That's a mind-boggling theory actually, that some general survival skills are encoded in the parent-child relationship. Basically you have to become a parent to level-up your survival skills.
I wouldn't put it past evolution to encode useful information wherever possible, but it would be hard to prove that theory.
Human activities lack the sophistication of an ecosystem that is in balance and cannot recreate the network of benefits thereof.