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Trump's Federal Funding Freeze and Mean-Field Game Theory
- qrsjutsu 2y ago[dead]
- snailmailstare 2y agoFor fields like academia it is interesting to see them impacted, but other areas don't even relate to any meaningful government financial sponsorship. I've been wondering for a few decades now if we shouldn't create a rendezvous site outside of all the countries that require a visa to work. It's my understanding that some countries try to make special economic zones that fit the bill, but I'm a little sceptical these are that independent. As an example, say I want to hire a asylum seeker who will be returned to Syria and wants to go anywhere else, is there a list of anywhere else we could agree to make a contract and done?
- duxup 2y agoI’m not sure how that relates to the article, but given your description couldn’t you hire someone to work remotely?
- snailmailstare 2y agoFor me the question is the Nash equilibriums if people with libertarian interests don't at least trust governments to be a little predicable on some topics.. Hiring someone remotely doesn't really give them a visa where ever they want to be there are I think odd ideas of bilateral agreements to whatever state owns their nationality.
- 46Bit 2y ago> I've been wondering for a few decades now if we shouldn't create a rendezvous site outside of all the countries that require a visa to work There's always Svalbard
- revskill 2y agoI prefer notion to mastodon for blogging
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoMastodon has, for years now, a large math community. "Mathstodon". Tao posts there, Greg Egan posts math stuff there, many others. Just how it is; it's not something new. And it's not really a blogging platform so much as it is a social networking platform, for those who participate in it. Real-time peer-review.
- krapp 2y agoSocial media replaced blogging for most people so it's more or less the same thing. I find myself wanting to blog again all the time but I tend to just post to Mastodon or bsky because at least then I know someone might read it.
- n4r9 2y agoFor reference here's an article about the NSF grant pause mentioned in the linked post: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/science-research-policy/2025/01/28/nsf-cancels-grant-reviews-comply-trump-eos https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/science-resea... [Edit: I initially confused the NSF and the NIH. Have now corrected the link]
- mangecoeur 2y agoHardly surprising that an administration that built its brand on “post truth” has no interest in the good functioning of academic research
- yodsanklai 2y agoGenerally speaking, conservatives are ambivalent on the topic of education and research. Why they may benefit from uneducated voters, they understand the value of qualified labour for their businesses.
- highcountess 2y ago[flagged]
- palmfacehn 2y agoI'm inclined to agree on some points. You'll have a hard time communicating your ideas with this audience. Firstly, it is something that many here do not agree with or want to hear. Even the ideally formulated message containing these ideas will inspire a negative reaction. Understanding that, you will get more mileage by tailoring your message. Plainly saying these things is too blunt for most to even consider.
- Jerrrry 2y ago[flagged]
- rUsHeYaFuBu 2y ago[flagged]
- cjfd 2y agoMaybe a supremacist mindset is appropriate when the other side has deteriorated into something pretty close to nazism. It is actually not very hard to be better than nazism. Your 'flip around' statement actually makes zero sense and the statement you are responding to is pretty accurate.
- mkoubaa 2y ago[flagged]
- palmfacehn 2y ago>...this thinking again assumes an oversimplified linear model: in practice, the rest of the world would not be able to absorb all of the lost opportunities in the US in a single job cycle, and some mathematicians may end up leaving the field entirely, or not obtain as enriching a career as they would otherwise have been able to achieve. Has the author considered the possibility that there may be an misallocation of resources directed towards academia? If the work is valuable, individuals in the private sector will voluntarily pay for it. Decentralized market pricing is the method by which dollar values are assigned. He could equally say, "My colleagues in the dig holes and refill them field have not received their grants for their important research. Think of all of the missed opportunities. This disruption may result in individuals leaving the dig & refill sector."
- krastanov 2y agoYes, the market is very well known to price in future breakthroughs or externalities. Especially when it comes to something like fundamental hard science and math that underpins most of our technological progress over the last few centuries.
- palmfacehn 2y agoAgreed. This is the basis of private research and development.
- frotaur 2y agoYou may have missed the sarcasm
- boesboes 2y agoYeah, I also really like how that market put Humans on the moon & enabled the yeeeears of mDNA research that enabled covid to be tackled. Is capitalism a cult?
- ANewFormation 2y ago
- spuz 2y agoThe NSF's executive orders page says: > Office of Management and Budget Memorandum M-25-13, issued on Jan. 27, 2025, directs all federal agencies to conduct a comprehensive review of their financial assistance programs to determine programs, projects and activities that may be implicated by the recent executive orders. Therefore, all review panels, new awards and all payments of funds under open awards will be paused as the agency conducts the required reviews and analysis. The Office of Management and Budget Memorandum M-25-13 lists a series of 8 different EOs none of which seem to be relevant to the NSF (although I haven't looked into them). It also says: > The guidance establishes a process for agencies to work with OMB to determine quickly whether any program is inconsistent with the President’s Executive Orders. A pause could be as short as day. In fact, OMB has worked with agencies and has already approved many programs to continue even before the pause has gone into effect. It would be good to know exactly which EOs are blocking the NSF's grants. Also, it sounds like the government are willing to approve spending as long as it has been through an internal review process which presumably if those grants were all but confirmed they should have already been through an internal review process. https://new.nsf.gov/executive-orders https://new.nsf.gov/executive-orders https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/01/923/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/01/923/
- sega_sai 2y agoyes, sure, reviewing thousands of programs will take very little time.
- BoredPositron 2y agoThe first orders were co-authored by AI. Why not the reviews as well?
- spuz 2y agoNot saying this is a good thing - I don't agree with any of the EOs, I'm just wondering which if any affect science research.
- sega_sai 2y ago
- piker 2y agoTerence Tao is an inspiring person in a field we all find compelling. He's formalized the plight of such field here as a result of the administration's approach to cost-cutting. That doesn't mean that it isn't necessary. Sure, there are better theoretical ways to reduce spending, but it doesn't take a tremendous amount of experience to recognize the incentives just don't align with accomplishing that goal. A cross-the-board stop/cut also neuters the pork-barreling and self-serving political advocacy that would kill more nuanced reductions.
- pmezard 2y agoWhat mechanisms prevent the "pork-barreling and self-serving political advocacies" to take effect when re-instating some of these spendings?
- piker 2y agoA great question! I can't think of anything that will. I think one idea would be to trim the budget broadly every year in a similar vein to align with receipts and let the people periodically decide anew what to fund.
- nhinck3 2y agoSo stability has zero value?
- piker 2y agoDefinitely not, but there don't seem to be any structures which counter the political incentives to continuously increase spending. And only one federal government in the last 50 years has run a balanced budget.
- nhinck3 2y agoSo a party which has almost absolute control of the political system but can't be trusted in setting up said structures is the party you trust with slashing and burning spending in a way that "balances" the budget. Why do you think there aren't incentives at play here in whats being cut?
- flemishgun 2y agoI was surprised to not find the funding freeze discussed on HN yesterday and I am speechless today at some of the comments I am reading in here. Are readers not aware of the scope and impact of this? I will tell you my story: I am funded by NASA to develop and maintain open-source machine learning software that they use directly on satellites. I am not the only one: many open source scientific software projects that are in widespread use are funded via federal grants of one form or another. Such grants are funded on a reimbursement basis (or at least mine is): each month, I submit an invoice (via the scientific software 501(c)3 of which I am a part). Then NASA pays it. When the EO was announced, my guidance was simply that NASA was not going to pay out for a while and my February paycheck was just going to not show up for a while. To my knowledge, this was basically the guidance for every NASA, NSF, NIH, etc. grant. (I believe DARPA grants are not frozen.) These do not just fund what the more conservative among us might call 'mathematical wankery', they fund all kinds of things across science. The issue is not whether some of these grants should have been issued in the first place. The issue is that suddenly, a large group of researchers is either not going to get paid, or their organizations are going to have to float their salary themselves on behalf of the federal government, because the federal government has just said that they plan to renege on their agreements. How many will miss rent or mortgage payments? Although the order has been blocked for now, it is still unclear what it will mean for me and others. (I would submit an invoice on Feb. 1... would it be paid?) It's not like I just got laid off and can go look for other work now: the funding is likely to come back, I just get the joy of having no idea when. For those of you who seem to have little problem with the EO itself: please take at least a few moments to consider whether your principles outweigh the real human costs here, and whether there might have been a less brutalistic way of achieving the same principles.
- sega_sai 2y agoI completely agree, the whole type of decision making wrecks people's life. Fine, if the government wants have a discussion of what programs to fund, lets have that, but this id.otic 'stop funding' orders is just horrific for people involved. There could be people on grants, who are just planning to move to the US from some other country, who finished their previous contracts whose lives will be suspended. I remember the same thing happened last time with the 'travel bans'. Obviously this new government does not give a sh.t about people and rational decision making, but it's bizarre how some people in this thread are trying to justify that...
- meltyness 2y agoIs it also a disaster that many math education programs don't hinge on automated proof assistants? "we just don't know" is a non-answer. If Tao's point is in predicting rapid change from a game theoretic perspective, perhaps it would behoove university executives to court industry for research dollars, instead of an ouroboros of invented problems and federal tax dollars. Even state tax dollars are more likely to have a clear purpose.
- singularity2001 2y agohow did the joke go: other disciplines need funding, math just needs to chalk.(?)