5 ms·

> This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. Unfortunately, sentences like this are going to be way less common soon.

libraryatnight 1y ago
It's been sad reading the posts of the various people in the sciences and academics that I follow.
jimbob45 1y ago
[flagged]
- gr_norm 1y ago
  https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=73 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=73 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_univers... Doesn't seem to be true? The LLM response claims 47.5 billion but I have no idea where it got that number from after looking through its sources. edit: Oh, and if you're talking about the Permanent University Fund that's split between the UT + A&M systems. And the ChatGPT response is way off here as well. And as the others have noted, even if what you said was true it has very little to do with what you're replying to.
- 0_____0 1y ago
  This doesn't invalidate the comment you're replying to.
- bix6 1y ago
  What if I told you that an endowment isn’t a pile of cash that should be burned through in 4 years to cover an imbecilic government shortfall?
- RandallBrown 1y ago
  If you told me that I would ask for some clarification. The UT system has a very large endowment, (which appears to be a little smaller than Harvard's), but UT Austin is much smaller (but still very large for a public university.) I'd also ask why you included the University of Florida in that list, since it appears their endowment is pretty small (at least compared to the other schools in that list.)
  - gr_norm 1y ago
    I'm guessing they relied on an LLM response. That was my thought, and having tried it they indeed generate lots of garbage for this topic. I got a ChatGPT A/B test for this and both options were incorrect (one obviously and the other subtly, due to misinterpreting a bond rating page's discussion of the PUF and just blindly regurgitating the number from there).
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > What if I told you UT has a higher endowment than any other school in the US including Harvard? I would ask your data source, because Wikipedia has 2024 stats indicating Harvard’s endowment is ~$4.5 billion greater than the UT system’s ($52B vs $47.5B). I’d also point out that the UT system has almost 9 times the student body size as Harvard (250k+ vs 30k) spread among 14 campuses.
gosub100 1y ago
[flagged]
- jpalawaga 1y ago
  That's not really born out by... anything. Well, born out by people who have something to gain by privatizing the public good.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
  They may even have women on the team!
  - hdivider 1y ago
    Yes indeed, what a travesty. :) Or they may study misinformation, another affront to civilization itself, because of course we know exactly how it works in this ultra-fast AI era with several competing superpowers.
- hdivider 1y ago
  You are typing this with software built on top of an incredibly vast technology stack which simply would not exist without federal R&D funding. May be worth remembering this fact. In the next few hours, you will almost certainly use non-digital technology essential to life which simply did not originate from commercial R&D (such as it is). The beginning is nearly always federal R&D funding. Much of it won't work, sure, and that's fine. It's not wasted, because when it works, it creates such a massive everlasting surplus and opportunity machine that it overcomes all past failures by orders of magnitude. Such as, computers, and all they enabled over the last 100-ish years. The myth of the lone inventor in the garage should have been updated even in the pre-WW2 era.
  - bruce511 1y ago
    When it's VCs investing private money, on a high risk, high return (to private individuals) that's celebrated. The recipients (aka founders) will mostly lose that "grant" money, and end up with nothing to show for it. Of course the winners produce massive economic gains to the general public. Alas when the govt follows the exact same model, taking high risk, high reward bets, then it's seen as "wasteful spending". Despite the staggering value of the wins, it becomes better to "spend nothing" than waste a penny on research that goes nowhere. The levels of cognitive dissonance, not to mention hypocrisy, are truly incredible. And the charge is being lead by someone who literally made his wealth from this model.
agumonkey 1y ago
Hopefully this will be short lived, like financial crisis. Hopefully.
- KennyBlanken 1y ago
  You can't just hit "pause" on this stuff. I have at least one friend who runs a biomedical research lab. From conversations, here is what it going on: - incoming students and researchers have been retracting their applications because of fear of ending up in detention for having something the regime doesn't like on their phone or on social media, or having their photo snapped at a protest about something the regime doesn't like, or their research being on a subject the regime doesn't like...or even something as stupid as the letters "trans" appearing as part of a word like "transgenic." (That's actually happened.) - the schools have had to retract offers for others because there's no money to pay their stipends or for their lab/office space - meeting with their administrations to discuss how long their schools can float salaries for lab staff. Admin assistants, scientific support staff like lab and animal technicians, and so on. - planning phases of the euthanization of their organism / animal models - planning phasing of the liquidation of lab equipment (in a market being flooded with such equipment) My friends are talking about not being able to bear making their techs or researchers mass-euthanize research animal populations (typically rodents) and doing it themselves, in tears. Many of them justify the normal 'sacrifice' of research animals because their deaths help us advance science - but in this case, it's just because some transactional dickhead can't directly draw a crayon line between their research and GDP. But it's also because it's a visceral representation of scientific progress being destroyed. All to "own the libs" (but really to give billionaires tax cuts.) One said they are trying to figure out what to do now that their career, which they have spent two decades of 60+ hour weeks on, is basically over - what little positions are left will see hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Salaries will plunge both out of necessity and a saturated labor supply. The damage that has been done in less than 6 months to scientific research is immesurable and the consequences will be generational. If you don't believe me, go through your list of friends, coworkers, family, etc and see who works in research and see what they're posting on social media or talk with them. Got any friends who work in companies that make scientific equipment, reagents, etc? They might not have a job already, or soon. Kids get into science in part because their parents or a family member is in science. Or they see a cool show on PBS about science. All that's going away. We're going to see a precipitous drop in the number of people pursuing scientific educations and careers. Billionaires are about to find out that it doesn't matter how much money you have if your kid has cancer and there's nobody to treat them, no drugs being researched or manufactured, no diagnostic equipment (that was in part funded by research project grants), and o on.
misja111 1y ago
Well as long as they carefully avoid phrases like climate change or energy transition, they might be able to avoid the wrath of the Trump administration.
- whatshisface 1y ago
  That was what the NSF director may have thought during the first 100 or so days of the administration, but he resigned because he believed that the 55% budget cut wasn't possible to overcome through negotiation.
dang 1y ago
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Why that last bit? Generic tangents supplant narrower/specific topics with broader/generic ones that people tend to already have opinions about, which they are eager to repeat. Because of this, generic tangents—especially on divisive/indignant topics—end up having two bad effects: (1) they take over the conversation, and (2) they are repetitive. It's similar to how weeds take over a garden. We want a garden of unusual, interesting plants, not the most common ones that take over everywhere if allowed to. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=generic%20discussion%20by%3Adang%20-flamewars%20-flamewar&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- munchler 1y ago
  I hear you, although I respectfully disagree that my comment was either flamebait or a generic tangent. The topic is (IMHO) appropriate for HN, and a concrete example like this is a good way to highlight the issue. It seems quite far from a common weed to me.
  - dang 1y ago
    It's generic in the sense that it masks out all the bits about fusion energy, let alone this specific report of a discovery, in favor of the much larger and more general topic of what's happening with science and health funding in the US.
    - tekno45 1y ago
      its directly related to where the science happened and who funded it.
- mxkopy 1y ago
  To play devil’s advocate, there are some fairly specific and novel things going on in the US that I’m surprised HN doesn’t see more discussion of.
Dave_Wishengrad 1y ago
[dead]

libraryatnight 1y ago

It's been sad reading the posts of the various people in the sciences and academics that I follow.

jimbob45 1y ago

[flagged]

gr_norm 1y ago
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=73 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=73 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_univers... Doesn't seem to be true? The LLM response claims 47.5 billion but I have no idea where it got that number from after looking through its sources. edit: Oh, and if you're talking about the Permanent University Fund that's split between the UT + A&M systems. And the ChatGPT response is way off here as well. And as the others have noted, even if what you said was true it has very little to do with what you're replying to.
0_____0 1y ago
This doesn't invalidate the comment you're replying to.
bix6 1y ago
What if I told you that an endowment isn’t a pile of cash that should be burned through in 4 years to cover an imbecilic government shortfall?
RandallBrown 1y ago
If you told me that I would ask for some clarification. The UT system has a very large endowment, (which appears to be a little smaller than Harvard's), but UT Austin is much smaller (but still very large for a public university.) I'd also ask why you included the University of Florida in that list, since it appears their endowment is pretty small (at least compared to the other schools in that list.)
- gr_norm 1y ago
  I'm guessing they relied on an LLM response. That was my thought, and having tried it they indeed generate lots of garbage for this topic. I got a ChatGPT A/B test for this and both options were incorrect (one obviously and the other subtly, due to misinterpreting a bond rating page's discussion of the PUF and just blindly regurgitating the number from there).
dragonwriter 1y ago
> What if I told you UT has a higher endowment than any other school in the US including Harvard? I would ask your data source, because Wikipedia has 2024 stats indicating Harvard’s endowment is ~$4.5 billion greater than the UT system’s ($52B vs $47.5B). I’d also point out that the UT system has almost 9 times the student body size as Harvard (250k+ vs 30k) spread among 14 campuses.

gosub100 1y ago

[flagged]

jpalawaga 1y ago
That's not really born out by... anything. Well, born out by people who have something to gain by privatizing the public good.
vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
They may even have women on the team!
- hdivider 1y ago
  Yes indeed, what a travesty. :) Or they may study misinformation, another affront to civilization itself, because of course we know exactly how it works in this ultra-fast AI era with several competing superpowers.
hdivider 1y ago
You are typing this with software built on top of an incredibly vast technology stack which simply would not exist without federal R&D funding. May be worth remembering this fact. In the next few hours, you will almost certainly use non-digital technology essential to life which simply did not originate from commercial R&D (such as it is). The beginning is nearly always federal R&D funding. Much of it won't work, sure, and that's fine. It's not wasted, because when it works, it creates such a massive everlasting surplus and opportunity machine that it overcomes all past failures by orders of magnitude. Such as, computers, and all they enabled over the last 100-ish years. The myth of the lone inventor in the garage should have been updated even in the pre-WW2 era.
- bruce511 1y ago
  When it's VCs investing private money, on a high risk, high return (to private individuals) that's celebrated. The recipients (aka founders) will mostly lose that "grant" money, and end up with nothing to show for it. Of course the winners produce massive economic gains to the general public. Alas when the govt follows the exact same model, taking high risk, high reward bets, then it's seen as "wasteful spending". Despite the staggering value of the wins, it becomes better to "spend nothing" than waste a penny on research that goes nowhere. The levels of cognitive dissonance, not to mention hypocrisy, are truly incredible. And the charge is being lead by someone who literally made his wealth from this model.

agumonkey 1y ago

Hopefully this will be short lived, like financial crisis. Hopefully.

KennyBlanken 1y ago
You can't just hit "pause" on this stuff. I have at least one friend who runs a biomedical research lab. From conversations, here is what it going on: - incoming students and researchers have been retracting their applications because of fear of ending up in detention for having something the regime doesn't like on their phone or on social media, or having their photo snapped at a protest about something the regime doesn't like, or their research being on a subject the regime doesn't like...or even something as stupid as the letters "trans" appearing as part of a word like "transgenic." (That's actually happened.) - the schools have had to retract offers for others because there's no money to pay their stipends or for their lab/office space - meeting with their administrations to discuss how long their schools can float salaries for lab staff. Admin assistants, scientific support staff like lab and animal technicians, and so on. - planning phases of the euthanization of their organism / animal models - planning phasing of the liquidation of lab equipment (in a market being flooded with such equipment) My friends are talking about not being able to bear making their techs or researchers mass-euthanize research animal populations (typically rodents) and doing it themselves, in tears. Many of them justify the normal 'sacrifice' of research animals because their deaths help us advance science - but in this case, it's just because some transactional dickhead can't directly draw a crayon line between their research and GDP. But it's also because it's a visceral representation of scientific progress being destroyed. All to "own the libs" (but really to give billionaires tax cuts.) One said they are trying to figure out what to do now that their career, which they have spent two decades of 60+ hour weeks on, is basically over - what little positions are left will see hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Salaries will plunge both out of necessity and a saturated labor supply. The damage that has been done in less than 6 months to scientific research is immesurable and the consequences will be generational. If you don't believe me, go through your list of friends, coworkers, family, etc and see who works in research and see what they're posting on social media or talk with them. Got any friends who work in companies that make scientific equipment, reagents, etc? They might not have a job already, or soon. Kids get into science in part because their parents or a family member is in science. Or they see a cool show on PBS about science. All that's going away. We're going to see a precipitous drop in the number of people pursuing scientific educations and careers. Billionaires are about to find out that it doesn't matter how much money you have if your kid has cancer and there's nobody to treat them, no drugs being researched or manufactured, no diagnostic equipment (that was in part funded by research project grants), and o on.

misja111 1y ago

Well as long as they carefully avoid phrases like climate change or energy transition, they might be able to avoid the wrath of the Trump administration.

whatshisface 1y ago
That was what the NSF director may have thought during the first 100 or so days of the administration, but he resigned because he believed that the 55% budget cut wasn't possible to overcome through negotiation.

dang 1y ago

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Why that last bit? Generic tangents supplant narrower/specific topics with broader/generic ones that people tend to already have opinions about, which they are eager to repeat. Because of this, generic tangents—especially on divisive/indignant topics—end up having two bad effects: (1) they take over the conversation, and (2) they are repetitive. It's similar to how weeds take over a garden. We want a garden of unusual, interesting plants, not the most common ones that take over everywhere if allowed to. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=generic%20discussion%20by%3Adang%20-flamewars%20-flamewar&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

munchler 1y ago
I hear you, although I respectfully disagree that my comment was either flamebait or a generic tangent. The topic is (IMHO) appropriate for HN, and a concrete example like this is a good way to highlight the issue. It seems quite far from a common weed to me.
- dang 1y ago
  It's generic in the sense that it masks out all the bits about fusion energy, let alone this specific report of a discovery, in favor of the much larger and more general topic of what's happening with science and health funding in the US.
  - tekno45 1y ago
    its directly related to where the science happened and who funded it.
mxkopy 1y ago
To play devil’s advocate, there are some fairly specific and novel things going on in the US that I’m surprised HN doesn’t see more discussion of.

Dave_Wishengrad 1y ago

[dead]