8 ms·

I didn't look at every one on the list of these 1000 NSF grants that were cancelled: https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jntvk%3Asort=eyJw

I didn't look at every one on the list of these 1000 NSF grants that were cancelled: https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jntvk%3Asort=eyJwZWw4ZlRSME8ycmFObWNUYyI6eyJjb2x1bW5JZCI6ImZsZHlMSEpuZkR6OXE1dEw0IiwiYXNjZW5kaW5nIjpmYWxzZX19 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.

userbinator 1y ago
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.
- hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
  You do realize VCs were putting billions into this shit a few years ago right? Maybe DOGE should have shut down YCombinator.
  - nickff 1y ago
    VCs also put lots of money into Theranos, it doesn’t make it a good idea.
    - marcus_holmes 1y ago
      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.
      - bestham 1y ago
        A good idea is an idea that possible to turn into reality, else it is just an idea.
        riffraff 1y ago
        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.
        marcus_holmes 1y ago
        How do you know if you can or cannot turn the idea into reality without trying?
        pona-a 1y ago
        By conducting a throughout literature review over possible methods, consulting the experts, and checking if your proposed method is within laws of physics?
        fallingknife 1y ago
        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.
        n4r9 1y ago
        Venture capital is not a good way to fund theoretical work. And Einstein didn't lie about his achievements.
        mensetmanusman 1y ago
        That there could be useful LLMs was theoretically argued about; essentially VC funding answered what wasn’t happening in academia.
  - userbinator 1y ago
    Fortunately, VCs weren't doing that with taxpayer's money.
    - a_bonobo 1y 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. Nice visualisation here: https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/personal-finance/history-us-income-tax https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/personal-finance/hi...
      - anovikov 1y ago
        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.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  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.
- lumost 1y ago
  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?
  - huijzer 1y ago
    > 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.
hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
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 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.
- gotoeleven 1y ago
  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.
viraptor 1y ago
> 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...
- gotoeleven 1y ago
  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.
  - viraptor 1y ago
    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.
ruytlm 1y ago
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 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?
- gotoeleven 1y ago
  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-reduces-penalty-knowingly-exposing-someone-hiv-n809416 https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-california-law-r...
  - foldr 1y ago
    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/HIV-Criminalization-Transmission-Dec-2016.pdf https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/HI...
hiddencost 1y ago
[flagged]
- foxglacier 1y ago
  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.
- tomhow 1y ago
  You can't post like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. Also, other recent comments of yours have been breaking the guidelines and we've received complaints. If you could please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future, we'd appreciate it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
intended 1y ago
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.
- foxglacier 1y ago
  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?
  - intended 1y ago
    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.
sebmellen 1y ago
Wow. You’ve radicalized me. This is almost beyond parody.
eli_gottlieb 1y ago
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.
- fsckboy 1y ago
  >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.
  - eli_gottlieb 1y ago
    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.
    - fsckboy 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - eli_gottlieb 1y ago
        > 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.
- fallingknife 1y ago
  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.
  - 1y ago
ben_w 1y ago
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?" -- 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.
- gs17 1y ago
  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.
- ModernMech 1y ago
  > 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.
- wileydragonfly 1y ago
  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.
bo1024 1y ago
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.
- matkoniecz 1y ago
  > 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. Note that consent/support is partially result of this wedge being based on a real problems. Note: I am not claiming that what is happening is a good idea. But there are multiple reasons why many people actually support this or see no reason to spend their energy on opposing it. And some of them are quite valid. I think that https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-w... mostly matches my viewpoint > It reflects poorly on the Biden administration that you could only get a grant to cure cancer if you suggested you might teach an underrepresented minority child about it. But surely it also reflects poorly on the Republicans when they propose it for cancellation just because it did include the sentence about minorities. Just fund research to cure cancer without judging it on whether there’s a sentence about minority outreach in the grant proposal! > Still, if true that would be ~500 woke grants representing ~$250 million in funding. I agree with Cruz that the government has funded a lot of woke garbage. Getting rid of it ought to be an easy win. But this just makes it even worse that the administration has bungled it so badly that they make the DEI establishment look like paragons of competence in comparison.
eternauta3k 1y ago
More in-depth analysis from Scott Alexander: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-w...
- wileydragonfly 1y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic-Serving_Institution
jasonhong 1y ago
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.
- silotis 1y ago
  Did you look at the linked list? This is the opposite of cherry picking, nearly 100% of these grants are absurd.
sega_sai 1y ago
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
xphos 1y ago
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.

userbinator 1y ago

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.

hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
You do realize VCs were putting billions into this shit a few years ago right? Maybe DOGE should have shut down YCombinator.
- nickff 1y ago
  VCs also put lots of money into Theranos, it doesn’t make it a good idea.
  - marcus_holmes 1y ago
    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.
    - bestham 1y ago
      A good idea is an idea that possible to turn into reality, else it is just an idea.
      - riffraff 1y ago
        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.
      - marcus_holmes 1y ago
        How do you know if you can or cannot turn the idea into reality without trying?
        pona-a 1y ago
        By conducting a throughout literature review over possible methods, consulting the experts, and checking if your proposed method is within laws of physics?
        fallingknife 1y ago
        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.
        n4r9 1y ago
        Venture capital is not a good way to fund theoretical work. And Einstein didn't lie about his achievements.
        mensetmanusman 1y ago
        That there could be useful LLMs was theoretically argued about; essentially VC funding answered what wasn’t happening in academia.
- userbinator 1y ago
  Fortunately, VCs weren't doing that with taxpayer's money.
  - a_bonobo 1y 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. Nice visualisation here: https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/personal-finance/history-us-income-tax https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/personal-finance/hi...
    - anovikov 1y ago
      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.
AStonesThrow 1y ago
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.
lumost 1y ago
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?
- huijzer 1y ago
  > 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.

hshdhdhj4444 1y ago

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 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.

gotoeleven 1y ago
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.

viraptor 1y ago

> 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...

gotoeleven 1y ago
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.
- viraptor 1y ago
  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.

ruytlm 1y ago

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 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?

gotoeleven 1y ago
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-reduces-penalty-knowingly-exposing-someone-hiv-n809416 https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-california-law-r...
- foldr 1y ago
  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/HIV-Criminalization-Transmission-Dec-2016.pdf https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/HI...

hiddencost 1y ago

[flagged]

foxglacier 1y ago
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.
tomhow 1y ago
You can't post like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. Also, other recent comments of yours have been breaking the guidelines and we've received complaints. If you could please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future, we'd appreciate it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

intended 1y ago

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.

foxglacier 1y ago
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?
- intended 1y ago
  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.

sebmellen 1y ago

Wow. You’ve radicalized me. This is almost beyond parody.

eli_gottlieb 1y ago

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.

fsckboy 1y ago
>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.
- eli_gottlieb 1y ago
  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.
  - fsckboy 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - eli_gottlieb 1y ago
      > 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.
fallingknife 1y ago
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.
- 1y ago

ben_w 1y ago

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?" -- 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.

gs17 1y ago
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.
ModernMech 1y ago
> 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.
wileydragonfly 1y ago
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.

bo1024 1y ago

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.

matkoniecz 1y ago
> 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. Note that consent/support is partially result of this wedge being based on a real problems. Note: I am not claiming that what is happening is a good idea. But there are multiple reasons why many people actually support this or see no reason to spend their energy on opposing it. And some of them are quite valid. I think that https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-w... mostly matches my viewpoint > It reflects poorly on the Biden administration that you could only get a grant to cure cancer if you suggested you might teach an underrepresented minority child about it. But surely it also reflects poorly on the Republicans when they propose it for cancellation just because it did include the sentence about minorities. Just fund research to cure cancer without judging it on whether there’s a sentence about minority outreach in the grant proposal! > Still, if true that would be ~500 woke grants representing ~$250 million in funding. I agree with Cruz that the government has funded a lot of woke garbage. Getting rid of it ought to be an easy win. But this just makes it even worse that the administration has bungled it so badly that they make the DEI establishment look like paragons of competence in comparison.

eternauta3k 1y ago

More in-depth analysis from Scott Alexander: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-w...

wileydragonfly 1y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic-Serving_Institution

jasonhong 1y ago

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.

silotis 1y ago
Did you look at the linked list? This is the opposite of cherry picking, nearly 100% of these grants are absurd.

sega_sai 1y ago

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

xphos 1y ago

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.