"Support for education and research should be as fundamental as clean air or safe roads."
I think the current powers that be hold clean air and safe roads in the same esteem as they hold education and research.
Maybe "Support for education and research should be as fundamental as golf tournaments or Diet Coke" would be a better anology.
philjohn · 5h ago
Didn't Florida suggest using mining waste for road construction ... the kicker being that it's mildly radioactive?
PicassoCTs · 2h ago
The problem there is- that rubber friction, brings little particles from the road into the air- and you then inhale it. Ingestion and inhalation makes even alpha particles more dangerous. Of course it would be mainly for those living near the roads.
matkoniecz · 5h ago
How mildly?
Background radiation is a thing.
Granite and bananas are a tiny bit more radioactive than typical things, without making them dangerous.
roenxi · 4h ago
I have absolutely no idea, but it is in interesting question and until someone more cluey can chime in a quick search suggests:
So it looks like we're dealing with pretty standard rock. If this stuff was going to be banned without special permitting it is probably a little more risky than a granite kitchen-top counter if someone goes and sits on the road all day. Although this all raises the question of whether granite should be legal as a building material given that people get twitchy about this stuff - I doubt anyone can prove that granite is safe in this context.
generic92034 · 4h ago
Maybe abrasion creating dust to be inhaled by humans makes the difference here.
roenxi · 4h ago
It's plausible, but I think the experience thus far is any dust in the lungs is a health risk. Asbestos will not be soon forgotten.
I'd be more worried about testing phosphogypsum's mechanical properties before anyone starts testing the radioactive ones. And danger relative to tyre rubber; although that has probably already been studied somewhere since it is an obvious thing to check.
ben_w · 4h ago
I expect it to — roads wear down and need resurfacing often enough, and that stuff has to go somewhere, either into the air as dust or dissolved in the rain and run off into the soil.
HPsquared · 2h ago
Background radiation isn't the same as breathing in dust.
amarcheschi · 5h ago
Radioactive asphalt particles keep your lungs trained because otherwise they would get so lazy and stop working properly /s
geeal · 7h ago
Advances in computing sciences were not accomplished by investment strategies and nondisclosure agreements. It was accomplished by dedicated professional and academics with the highest levels of integrity and transparency.
So your post comes at a critical time where parties are jumping to the bandwagon of AI.
watwut · 6h ago
Where do you have integrity and transparency from? They were of all kinds.
ktallett · 6h ago
Transparency is the case, up to a point in research. Many engineering papers I find, have the told you the building blocks of what is required, but they try to avoid stating the secret sauce that binds them together.
mschuster91 · 4h ago
Yeah because otherwise you'll have some cloner in China reproducing it the very next day.
Transparency is only working if everyone plays by the same rules, particularly when it comes to patents, and there are a few players who have been getting away with openly sharting on the rules for decades now.
zmgsabst · 6h ago
Computer were invented at a lab funded by the military for applied math, with some guys showing up to run mystery calculations over night when the scientists hired to the project were gone.
mrkeen · 6h ago
Why didn't they get their usual 9-5ers to do the job? Why bother getting the guy who'd published the computing paper in academia in 1936 to come work at Bletchley in 1937?
Hilift · 3h ago
> Universities are left to defend The Promise of American Higher Education alone.
"Only the federal government can provide the funding needed".?
NSF fields 40,000 proposals per year, 110 per day.
The US is unlike other countries. By design, each state has their own capabilities, and owns everything except that which is specifically provided to the federal government. The combined capabilities of California and Massachusetts equal the remainder of the country. There's nothing to prevent any state from funding the universities in their states.
Was it more convenient before? Sure, but there is now an inflection point where more than 50% of the country "don't like you and wish you weren't here". You don't have to get beat up at the bus stop if you walk or take an uber.
This is hardly unique to research or higher education. All 50 states have negligently constructed budgets to rely on copius federal funding for health care (Medicaid) and education. That makes it easy for a petulant politician to kick sand in your face and "disrupt" that.
jfengel · 58m ago
States have much less flexible budgets. Many have balanced budget rules. They can't handle downturns. They already rely on the federal government to pick up economic slack.
And if you had the idea that they would be able to raise state taxes with the fat refund checks we'll all be getting with the proceeds of cutting the NSF... there aren't any.
throwaway287391 · 2h ago
"There's nothing to prevent any state from funding the universities in their states."
I would've thought one major issue is that a much larger chunk of tax revenue is collected by the IRS than by any state. From googling, CA has the highest state income tax rate but still collects <5% of US federal tax revenue, while having >10% of the population. ~2.5x'ing state taxes to attain similar per-capita revenue would probably lead to a fair number of people leaving the state, or at least get the party who passed that tax hike (presumably Democrats) voted out in the next state election.
OTOH the NSF annual budget is $10B/year, in theory "easily" fundable by CA alone with its $220B/year in tax revenue, in the worst case with a 5% tax increase. The NSF isn't the only federal agency that funds research (seems to provide around 25% of federal research funding) but it is probably enough for one state, even the most productive one. So maybe it really is doable.
CaptWillard · 7m ago
Academia and higher education have been central to some unsavory initiatives by federal agencies.
The tendency to remain (or appear) willfully ignorant of those while clutching pearls over funding cuts is frankly repugnant.
gotoeleven · 8h ago
I didn't look at every one on the list of these 1000 NSF grants that were cancelled:
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 · 8h 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.
lumost · 7h 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 · 7h 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.
AStonesThrow · 7h 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.
hshdhdhj4444 · 8h ago
You do realize VCs were putting billions into this shit a few years ago right?
Maybe DOGE should have shut down YCombinator.
userbinator · 7h ago
Fortunately, VCs weren't doing that with taxpayer's money.
a_bonobo · 6h ago
Given that the highest-earning income tax bracket's tax rate in the US fell from ~70% to 37% since the 70s, one could argue that VC money used to be taxpayer's money.
Not really. That might pertain to angels but not to VCs. They don't operate with private (individual)owned, post-tax dollars. They are businesses and operate with pre-tax, business money, not even theirs - but bank loans.
nickff · 8h ago
VCs also put lots of money into Theranos, it doesn’t make it a good idea.
marcus_holmes · 8h 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.
burch45 · 6h ago
Theranos wasn’t a great idea or even a good idea. The “idea” was
1. Get a drop of blood
2. …
3. Cure all diseases
That’s not even an idea. It’s just magical thinking.
AStonesThrow · 5h ago
No it wasn’t. They never promised anything like that.
Theranos technology was the proposition to run smart blood tests on very small volumes of blood drawn from patients on-site. That’s really about it. They couldn’t deliver this service but they never promised any cures, bro.
firesteelrain · 3h ago
It was implied which led to fraud convictions. Elizabeth Holmes made misleading claims that gave the impression their technology could revolutionize disease detection and management for example by speaking about a future where people could test themselves regularly and catch disease
jcranmer · 1h ago
The fraud in Theranos for which Holmes et al were ultimately convicted was running regular blood tests (i.e., those any certified lab would run) on samples which were too small so that the blood tests gave essentially random data. Yes, they made much more outlandish claims about what they could eventually do (and at times veered into making those claims about what they could do at the present), but the actual fraud was that they couldn't even do what they were certified to do.
bestham · 7h ago
A good idea is an idea that possible to turn into reality, else it is just an idea.
marcus_holmes · 6h ago
How do you know if you can or cannot turn the idea into reality without trying?
pona-a · 5h 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 · 5h 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 · 4h ago
Venture capital is not a good way to fund theoretical work. And Einstein didn't lie about his achievements.
riffraff · 7h 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.
anovikov · 6h ago
This. Even worse: every good idea is the one that looks bad to a layman, otherwise there won't be an opportunity there: if an idea is obviously good, a lot of people already came up with it a long time ago.
sebmellen · 7h ago
Wow. You’ve radicalized me. This is almost beyond parody.
1) I have had colleagues get grants cancelled doing basic research (e.g. computer security), no explanation, no DEI, can't get anyone at the NSF to answer questions why.
2) if you don't like the process, change the process. But have a democratically determined process. This is political fiat and the plan is to set up political thought police boards that control final funding decisions based on what the president personally likes.
3) if you like "basic research" and "important research", you must vehemently oppose what is being done to the NIH and NSF. Top researchers are already looking to flee the country, Canada and Europe are offering very nice incentive packages. In weeks, USA went from attracting the best talent around the world, to being radioactive for international researchers. Budgets slashed, the pipeline is being decimated.
4) the point is to crush universities, because that is where dissent is largest, damage to science and research is considered an acceptable side effect.
5) and driving a wedge - in this case "woke" and "DEI" - is exactly how trump and goons get average people to consent, or even support, this decimating of our research apparatus.
ben_w · 4h 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.
intended · 7h 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 · 6h 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 · 5h 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.
viraptor · 8h 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 · 8h 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 · 5h 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.
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?
Dig1t · 7h ago
Absolutely not cherry picking, almost every single one of these has to do with race, diversity, equity etc
“Amplifying Diverse Voices in STEM Education”
“Research Initiation: Long-Term Effect of Involvement in Humanitarian Engineering Projects on Student Professional Formation and Views of Diversity and Inclusion”
“Conference: Future Faculty Workshop: Preparing Diverse Leaders for the Future, Summers of 2022-2025”
“RCN: LEAPS: Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology”
“CAREER: When Two Worlds Collide: An Intersectional Analysis of Black Women's Role Strain and Adaptation in Computing Sciences”
“EAGER: Collaborative Research: Promoting Diverse and Inclusive Leadership in the Geosciences (GOLD-EN)”
It goes on and on like that. Millions of dollars in taxpayer money.
>already been paid for and done, and you want to cut funding so you don't even get the final report/publications out of it
Yes, correct. This is tax payer money funding racist politics. It’s garbage pretend science and this stuff is done spreading.
userbinator · 6h ago
Finding the ones that aren't DEI-related is difficult. At first I found "CAREER: Understanding the Interdependence of the Microenvironment and Nuclear Organization in Stem Cell Aging" that looks neutral from its title, and the first part of its description was, but then there's this sentence in the middle that sticks out like a sore thumb: "The primary educational objective of this project is to develop a series of stories that focus on introducing concepts of stem cells and genomics to under-represented minority (URM) students in K-3." The rest of the details is neutral, however. It's so unusual that one wonders whether who wrote that was actually pro-DEI, or merely compelled to put in something to that effect in order to appease someone.
Darmani · 5h ago
Former academic here. That kind of stuff looks within the normal range of a Broader Impacts section. Since the 80s, if you do some obscure fundamental research, then you have to say how it's going to benefit people. Say you think there's a risk that it's not good enough to say "we will understand this natural process and there's a lot of ways that can be carried forward and then that will make it easier to figure out what to research in field X and then maybe that can be used to cure cancer or make guns." And there's always such a risk, with proposal acceptance rates being low. Then you add a sentence about how you'll also educate kids about that thing -- promising to spend a Wednesday afternoon visiting an elementary school sounds like a small price to pay for increasing the acceptance probability of a multi-year grant by 1%.
In the last few years, you had to say something about underrepresented minorities. If your university is in an urban environment where it so happens that the local elementary school is full of URMs, then you don't even need to change anything about your plan.
robocat · 4h ago
> It’s garbage pretend science
The scientists are not to blame for the appalling incentives of the grant system here.
Wait a few years and we'll get the same thing again except the titles of the bad science will be:
* An economic analysis of rehoming manufacturing to underepresented states
* a study of price inelasticity of Greenlander's real estate?
* benefits of the politically disenfranchised attacking the senate as compared to archaic senate law making.
graycat · 5h ago
And for the people who get that money, guess who they will be voting for and donating to political campaigns for, etc.
"Always look for the hidden agenda."
gotoeleven · 7h 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.
It’s very unclear what point you’re trying to make with the linked article.
First of all, it’s not an example of HIV research, so what could it have to do with links between left wing politics and HIV research?
Second, there isn’t anything “left wing” about the changes to California law made in 2017. It’s not a core tenet of right wing political philosophy that the penalty for knowingly exposing someone to HIV has to be higher than the penalty for knowingly exposing someone to any other communicable disease. It’s entirely possible to hold right wing political views but reject unjust laws passed at the height of homophobic AIDS panic in the 80s.
If you look into the details of prosecutions under the relevant laws, you find that many were patently silly and unjust. For example, HIV positive prostitutes were convicted merely for soliciting, without any evidence that unsafe sex (or indeed any sex at all) had subsequently taken place.
Can you show that the left-wing politics added up to 55% of the NSF's total budget and stretched across all 37 of its directorates? Because those are what's getting cut.
fsckboy · 7h 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 · 6h 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 · 5h ago
>Ok, so show me...
no, you show me the opposite.
you are expressing skepticism, so am I, so as far as that goes, we are Even Steven.
I'm older, more experienced (i've heard all your rhetorical tricks before), and I've have been on and understand, true believer, both sides of the political spectrum.
there is no basis for your incredulity, quite the opposite.
so, I'll wait for the evidence you are going to scamper off and find, which you are obligated to do because you have declared that you believe that evidence is important. I have not declared that, I just don't think opinions I disagree with should go unopposed.
I'll wait...
fallingknife · 5h 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.
anonymousDan · 4h ago
So people with a Latin background are not part of the public?
hshdhdhj4444 · 8h 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!
Oh, so that’s weird. Why does this show an end date of:
Aug 31, 2024!
That was last year!
I’m sure that was a mistake in the official website and the propaganda tool you linked to that supposedly gets its data from here somehow magically corrected that info, so let’s not be hasty and assume they made a chump of you by outright lying to you.
Oh, so it’s not $2.8mm in savings. It’s about $1mm in savings.
But what’s this…we can see the actual transactions.
Of the 4 outlays, the last outlay was made in Aug 2022, and there were no outlays in 2023 or 2024 despite the grant schedule showing all the $2.8mm should have been given out by Aug 2022.
It’s almost like the research, which completed in Aug 2024, didn’t need the entire $2.8mm that was allocated to it, and being legitimate researchers rather than liars and charlatans, only took the money they needed and left the $1mm for the government to use elsewhere.
Looks like the liars and charlatans are the people who created that table to make it look like they saved $2.8mm when in reality they saved $0, and the researches or this study you criticize actually saved the govt $1mm.
There’s no easier chump than someone who wants to be a chump.
gotoeleven · 8h 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.
intended · 5h ago
America is spending energy and effort to increase the number of scientists to include groups that historically dont see role models and exemplars to follow.
This is a society ensuring it’s getting people to be interested in advanced science. I think thats some of the most noble things a country can do.
linguae · 9h ago
Whenever I think about the decline of industrial research labs, not just the most famed like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, but also the labs at companies like Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Intel, and many others, I'm reminded of a quote from Alan Kay about how those who have financially benefited from applying the results of research have often not "given back" to research:
"It strikes me that many of the tech billionaires have already gotten their "upside" many times over from people like Engelbart and other researchers who were supported by ARPA, Parc, ONR, etc. Why would they insist on more upside, and that their money should be an "investment"? That isn't how the great inventions and fundamental technologies were created that eventually gave rise to the wealth that they tapped into after the fact.
"It would be really worth the while of people who do want to make money -- they think in terms of millions and billions -- to understand how the trillions -- those 3 and 4 extra zeros came about that they have tapped into. And to support that process." (from https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/).
Even before Trump's and DOGE's reckless attacks on research and academia, the software industry (I'm going to limit this to the software industry; I don't know the situation in other STEM industries such as health care, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, aerospace, etc.) has changed its strategy regarding funding research. Before the 2010s, many major companies had research labs where its employees worked on medium-term and long-term projects that may not have directly tied into current products but may form the basis of future products. If you had a computer science PhD and worked in an applied field such as systems or compilers, aside from academia and government labs, there were jobs at industrial labs where researchers could work on research systems. Sun, for example, had a lot of interesting research projects such as Self (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(programming_language) ; much of the work on Self influenced the design and implementation of the Java virtual machine). AltaVista, an early Web search engine that predates Google, was originally a research project at Digital Equipment Corporation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista) that was later spun off as its own company.
However, in the 2000s and especially in the 2010s, these jobs became increasingly rare. Having worked in industrial research labs and advanced development teams during the mid-2010s and early 2020s, what I've noticed is a trend away from dedicated research labs where researchers study phenomena and perhaps build prototypes that get passed onto a production team, and more toward a model where researchers are expected to write production code. Google's 2012 paper "Google's Hybrid Approach to Research" (https://research.google/pubs/googles-hybrid-approach-to-rese...) is an excellent summary. This makes a lot of sense under the context of early Google; Google in the 2000s needed to build large-scale distributed systems to power Google's search engine and other operations, but there was little experience within and outside the company on working on such Web-scale systems. Thus, Google hired CS PhDs with research experience in distributed systems and related topics, and then put them to work implementing systems such as MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, and many others. I see a similar mindset when it comes to AI companies such as OpenAI, where researchers directly work on production systems.
Researchers working directly on products that take advantage of research is an effective approach in many situations and it's brought us many innovations, especially in Web-scale systems, big data processing, and machine learning. However, not all research has obvious, direct productization opportunities. For one, not all computer science research is systems-based. There is theoretical computer science research, where researchers are exploring questions that may not immediately lead to new products, but may answer important questions regarding computing. Next, even in systems research, there are areas of research that could be productized a few decades down the road, but in order for those products to be created, the research needs to be done first. Deep neural networks took off once hardware became cheap enough to make DNN architectures feasible, for example. However, without the work done on neural networks in the decades prior to affordable GPUs, research on DNNs would be further behind compared to today.
The biggest problem that I see with attitudes regarding research funding, not just in industry, but also in academia and government, is that funders don't appreciate the fact that research is inherently risky; not all research projects are going to lead to positive results, and the lack of positive results is not a matter of a researcher's work ethic or competence. Funders seem to want sure bets; they seem to only be interested in funding research that has a very high ROI likelihood.
Yes, funders should have the freedom to fund the projects and researchers that they want. There are obvious reasons why funders are more interested in hot topics such as large language models and blockchain applications versus topics where there is less of an obvious likelihood for short-term ROI. However, I feel that it is important to fund less obviously lucrative research efforts. I feel industry is not interested these days in making more speculative bets, kind of like the research projects that Xerox PARC did back in the 1970s.
Academia seems like a natural home for more speculative research. Unfortunately academia has two major pressures that undermine this: (1) the "publish-or-perish" culture found at many major research universities, and (2) fundraising pressures. These two factors, in my opinion, encourage academics, especially pre-tenure and non-tenured ones, to optimize their research pursuits for "sure bets" instead of riskier but potentially higher impact work. The fundraising pressures have gotten much worse now with the abrupt cuts to research funding in the United States.
A long-term solution to this problem requires cultivating a culture that is more understanding of the research process, that research is inherently risky, and that different types of research require different funding mechanisms. I'm all in favor of Google- and OpenAI-style research projects where researchers are directly involved with product-building efforts, but I'm also in favor of other styles of research that are not directly tied to product-building. I also want to see a culture where large corporations and wealthy individuals donate meaningful amounts of money to fund research efforts.
It would be a major setback for society for us to return to the pre-1940s days of "gentlemen scientists" where science and other academic pursuits were only reserved for the independently wealthy and for those who relied on patronage. Modern technological innovations are made possible through research, and it's important that research efforts are funded in a regular manner.
robocat · 7h ago
If one altruistically decides to give to society then I'm unsure what outcomes one should expect from society? What's the game-theory here? If one wants something back then who is responsible to get something back?
My canonical example is Linus: if the world was fair he should be worth some pretty big numbers. It is harder to pick what is fair in return for someone's scientific innovation. I would guess Linus has generated as much worth as Microsoft, so in an ideal world he should be worth a Bill Gates. Linus has mostly chosen other non-financial goals to chase (unlike Bill). Linus $50 million, Bill Gates $156 billion.
“While I may not get any money from Linux, I get a huge personal satisfaction from having written something that people really enjoy using.”
“The cyberspace earnings I get from Linux come in the format of having a network of people that know me and trust me, and that I can depend on in return.”
Some people that complain about the wealthy making money are selfishly obsessed about money themselves. Perhaps even hypocritically denegrating others as too-money-focused when others choose to win the money making game.
Unfortunately our world tends to be very focused on financial gains; and often completely ignoring non-financial benefits.
What are the non-financial benefits of an iPhone compared to the money paid for it?
How much is job-enjoyment or job-status worth; compared against either the money earned or the time spent?
realityking · 7h ago
> I would guess Linus has generated as much worth as Microsoft
Microsoft makes everything from game consoles to ERP systems while Linus created one part of an operating system and a source control system. Linus certainly captured less of the economic value he created than Microsoft’s founders shareholders but Microsoft has generated much, much more (economic) value.
robocat · 4h ago
Well, I'll pick a similar counterexample then.
Microsoft valued Github at over $7.5 billion in stock at acquisition.
git was developed by Linus, subsequently generating economic value for Microsoft.
What was git worth economically? Did Microsoft pay Linus for any of the value it received?
maratc · 1h ago
There is tremendous value in git, however you need to take into consideration the fact that 100% of the people and companies who pay GitHub (and thus, generate value for Microsoft) have the option of just using git without GitHub, for $0.
This causes me to think that what these people are actually paying for is GitHub, and not git.
Which causes me to think that, when Microsoft valued Github at over $7.5 billion, that value reflected the value of GitHub sans git.
Linus is in business of advancing the humanity, without making billions in the process. I can only salute him for that.
firesteelrain · 3h ago
Git is foundational. GitHub added value by building collaboration tools, UIs, CI/CD integration, and a social coding layer on top of Git. Git is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL v2), which allows anyone to use, modify, and distribute it freely under its terms.
It’s an infrastructure that others build on.
potato3732842 · 3h ago
>However, in the 2000s and especially in the 2010s, these jobs became increasingly rare.
These jobs became rare because academia took them. The pie may have grown or shrunk a bit but mostly what happened is that instead of running this stuff in house BigCo will sponsor or parter with some university lab or research program.
I haven't crunched the numbers but I suspect that they get better write offs this way.
kianN · 8h ago
This really hits the nail on the head. I think the extension to this is the all eggs in one (the first) basket approach being exacerbated: it’s always been challenging to conduct foundational research in a field where there already exists a dominant paradigm in industry, but it’s also becoming more and more challenging in academia as well.
lwo32k · 7h ago
What culture you cultivate is just one variable. Go to Japan or Iran or Italy and they will fall over each other, telling you how great their culture was and what it cultivated. When things are relatively stable, it's not hard to lean on the Explore side of the Explore-Exploit tradeoff. When things are ever changing, and at faster and unpredictable rates the tradeoff naturally gets much more complex.
You have to ride the waves. No one really controls them.
fallingknife · 4h ago
> It would be a major setback for society for us to return to the pre-1940s days of "gentlemen scientists" where science and other academic pursuits were only reserved for the independently wealthy and for those who relied on patronage. Modern technological innovations are made possible through research, and it's important that research efforts are funded in a regular manner.
How much of a setback would this really be, though? The US government spent $200 billion of R&D in 2024. Of that $200 billion, $140 billion of it was military related which is probably not in danger. Including private spending, total r&d was around $900 billion. So even if the $60 billion of non-military government research spending was entirely eliminated, that would be only around a 7% decline in spending.
But still that would be bad. That $60 billion is a lot to replace from private funding. I don't know if it would be a net negative, though. It seems like privately funded research can seriously outperform government funding because when private actors fund research, they do it for the specific reason that they want the research done. Contrast this with public funding which has to meet a lot of political goals that have nothing to do with science. Look what SpaceX has been able to accomplish vs NASA. NASA has great scientists and engineers and a much bigger budget than SpaceX did, but the problem is that their rocket building program was more of a jobs program and a way to spread money to a lot of congressional districts than it was about building rockets. Whereas SpaceX had exactly one goal and that was to build rockets.
I also think that it's important to fund research in a regular manner, but is government a more reliable way than private patrons? It feels like its the opposite. If we had a government that really cared about science and committed to funding it in an effective way and never using it as a cover to funnel money to political causes I do think it would be better than relying on private funding, but when I read a list of cancelled grant like this it doesn't seem like we do. https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt...
jltsiren · 3h ago
The are two fundamentally different kinds of private research funding. (Let's drop the &D part, because that's mostly unrelated to the kind of research we are talking about.)
Charitable foundations and similar organizations are not that different from government agencies funding research. They act on a smaller scale, because rich people are not actually that rich.
Then there are companies that do research as part of their business. They are typically much better funded and much narrower in scope than government-funded research. They are also biased towards topics that can be reasonably expected to work and produce economic value within the next 10-20 years. This kind of research is inherently inefficient due to redundant efforts. Instead of making their findings public, companies often keep the results secret, forcing their competitors to waste money on reinventing the wheel.
firesteelrain · 3h ago
SpaceX has benefited greatly from public spending - they just had a different operating model. NASA moved to the commercial space program. SpaceX has had many military and government contracts to sustain themselves. Texas offered subsidies for Boca Chica.
SpaceX has received substantial public investment in the form of contracts, infrastructure, and incentives so in essence SpaceX is benefiting the same way that you seem to abhor
charcircuit · 4h ago
The author is an associate professor at Harvard, so he is going to be biased towards academia.
>knows that our field’s landmark innovations emerged not purely from product roadmaps but from university labs with federal funding
Maybe if you cherry pick those innovations from things coming from university labs. Or count these labs because they openly announced something or popularized something else that already existed.
>The Talent Pipeline Under Threat
Talent can be taught by both AI and industry. University as a place for learning is an outdated concept.
geeal · 7h ago
Progress in computing sciences was never accomplished by investment strategies and nondisclosure agreements. It was accomplished by dedicated proffisionals and academics with a high level of integrity and transparency.
So your post seems very appropriate in the current state where all parties are jumping to the AI bandwogen.
I think the current powers that be hold clean air and safe roads in the same esteem as they hold education and research.
Maybe "Support for education and research should be as fundamental as golf tournaments or Diet Coke" would be a better anology.
Background radiation is a thing.
Granite and bananas are a tiny bit more radioactive than typical things, without making them dangerous.
- Florida is using photogypsum - https://www.ijpr.org/npr-news/2023-06-30/florida-moves-forwa...
- Photogypsum in the US is banned if it radiates at >0.4 Bq/g of 226 Ra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphogypsum
- Granite radiates at maybe 450 Bq/kg -> 0.45 Bq/g of 226 Ra. https://www.nature.com/articles/jes200944
So it looks like we're dealing with pretty standard rock. If this stuff was going to be banned without special permitting it is probably a little more risky than a granite kitchen-top counter if someone goes and sits on the road all day. Although this all raises the question of whether granite should be legal as a building material given that people get twitchy about this stuff - I doubt anyone can prove that granite is safe in this context.
I'd be more worried about testing phosphogypsum's mechanical properties before anyone starts testing the radioactive ones. And danger relative to tyre rubber; although that has probably already been studied somewhere since it is an obvious thing to check.
Transparency is only working if everyone plays by the same rules, particularly when it comes to patents, and there are a few players who have been getting away with openly sharting on the rules for decades now.
"Only the federal government can provide the funding needed".?
NSF fields 40,000 proposals per year, 110 per day.
The US is unlike other countries. By design, each state has their own capabilities, and owns everything except that which is specifically provided to the federal government. The combined capabilities of California and Massachusetts equal the remainder of the country. There's nothing to prevent any state from funding the universities in their states.
Was it more convenient before? Sure, but there is now an inflection point where more than 50% of the country "don't like you and wish you weren't here". You don't have to get beat up at the bus stop if you walk or take an uber.
This is hardly unique to research or higher education. All 50 states have negligently constructed budgets to rely on copius federal funding for health care (Medicaid) and education. That makes it easy for a petulant politician to kick sand in your face and "disrupt" that.
And if you had the idea that they would be able to raise state taxes with the fat refund checks we'll all be getting with the proceeds of cutting the NSF... there aren't any.
I would've thought one major issue is that a much larger chunk of tax revenue is collected by the IRS than by any state. From googling, CA has the highest state income tax rate but still collects <5% of US federal tax revenue, while having >10% of the population. ~2.5x'ing state taxes to attain similar per-capita revenue would probably lead to a fair number of people leaving the state, or at least get the party who passed that tax hike (presumably Democrats) voted out in the next state election.
OTOH the NSF annual budget is $10B/year, in theory "easily" fundable by CA alone with its $220B/year in tax revenue, in the worst case with a 5% tax increase. The NSF isn't the only federal agency that funds research (seems to provide around 25% of federal research funding) but it is probably enough for one state, even the most productive one. So maybe it really is doable.
The tendency to remain (or appear) willfully ignorant of those while clutching pearls over funding cuts is frankly repugnant.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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.
Maybe DOGE should have shut down YCombinator.
Nice visualisation here: https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/personal-finance/hi...
1. Get a drop of blood 2. … 3. Cure all diseases
That’s not even an idea. It’s just magical thinking.
Theranos technology was the proposition to run smart blood tests on very small volumes of blood drawn from patients on-site. That’s really about it. They couldn’t deliver this service but they never promised any cures, bro.
I mean, the people who put money into Theranos later should have done better due diligence, but I don't fault the initial investment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Look at the NIH grants listed, which by dollar value far outweigh the NSF grants listed: https://grant-watch.us/nih-data.html
Which part of preventing the spread of HIV is "left wing politics"? Or better understanding radiation exposure? Or developing anti-viral countermeasures?
Some $400m of remaining budget for preventing the spread of HIV was cut, and you're saying it's justified because less than $3m went to trying to improve professional development for a specific group of people?
I mean even look at the specific example you picked - $2.8m over 6 years, from 2019 through to an expected end date of 31 August 2025, and they cut the funding on 09 May 2025 - the work has already been paid for and done, and you want to cut funding so you don't even get the final report/publications out of it to, you know, have something of value to show for the money spent?
“Amplifying Diverse Voices in STEM Education”
“Research Initiation: Long-Term Effect of Involvement in Humanitarian Engineering Projects on Student Professional Formation and Views of Diversity and Inclusion”
“Conference: Future Faculty Workshop: Preparing Diverse Leaders for the Future, Summers of 2022-2025”
“RCN: LEAPS: Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology”
“CAREER: When Two Worlds Collide: An Intersectional Analysis of Black Women's Role Strain and Adaptation in Computing Sciences”
“EAGER: Collaborative Research: Promoting Diverse and Inclusive Leadership in the Geosciences (GOLD-EN)”
It goes on and on like that. Millions of dollars in taxpayer money.
>already been paid for and done, and you want to cut funding so you don't even get the final report/publications out of it
Yes, correct. This is tax payer money funding racist politics. It’s garbage pretend science and this stuff is done spreading.
In the last few years, you had to say something about underrepresented minorities. If your university is in an urban environment where it so happens that the local elementary school is full of URMs, then you don't even need to change anything about your plan.
The scientists are not to blame for the appalling incentives of the grant system here.
Wait a few years and we'll get the same thing again except the titles of the bad science will be:
* An economic analysis of rehoming manufacturing to underepresented states
* a study of price inelasticity of Greenlander's real estate?
* benefits of the politically disenfranchised attacking the senate as compared to archaic senate law making.
"Always look for the hidden agenda."
And I dunno if you're being pollyannish or what but HIV research is often very tied up in left wing politics. It may or may not be in this case. For example: https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-california-law-r...
First of all, it’s not an example of HIV research, so what could it have to do with links between left wing politics and HIV research?
Second, there isn’t anything “left wing” about the changes to California law made in 2017. It’s not a core tenet of right wing political philosophy that the penalty for knowingly exposing someone to HIV has to be higher than the penalty for knowingly exposing someone to any other communicable disease. It’s entirely possible to hold right wing political views but reject unjust laws passed at the height of homophobic AIDS panic in the 80s.
If you look into the details of prosecutions under the relevant laws, you find that many were patently silly and unjust. For example, HIV positive prostitutes were convicted merely for soliciting, without any evidence that unsafe sex (or indeed any sex at all) had subsequently taken place.
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/HI...
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.
no, you show me the opposite.
you are expressing skepticism, so am I, so as far as that goes, we are Even Steven.
I'm older, more experienced (i've heard all your rhetorical tricks before), and I've have been on and understand, true believer, both sides of the political spectrum.
there is no basis for your incredulity, quite the opposite.
so, I'll wait for the evidence you are going to scamper off and find, which you are obligated to do because you have declared that you believe that evidence is important. I have not declared that, I just don't think opinions I disagree with should go unopposed.
I'll wait...
I guess I was wrong.
But let’s ignore the idea that random commenter or random politico has a deeper understanding of what makes good research than the highly effective bodies with experts setup to do this. Let’s click the link for the study you actually complained about.
So here’s the first thing I see.
Start Date: Sep 1, 2019 End Date: Aug 31, 2025 Termination Date: May 9, 2025
Assuming equal outlays, you’re saving 4/60 * 2.8mm, so less than about $200k. Well, I guess 200k is a tiny fraction of $2.8mm but I guess that’s still a saving.
Oh wait, what’s this…there’s a link to USASpending.gov which is an official govt site that shows the actual outlays. Thats cool! And I can use the grant ID to see exactly what was done here. Nice!
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_1906595_4900
Oh, so that’s weird. Why does this show an end date of:
Aug 31, 2024!
That was last year!
I’m sure that was a mistake in the official website and the propaganda tool you linked to that supposedly gets its data from here somehow magically corrected that info, so let’s not be hasty and assume they made a chump of you by outright lying to you.
But what’s this. It gives actual amounts.
> Outlayed Amount $1,795,710.00 Obligated Amount $2,821,709.00
Oh, so it’s not $2.8mm in savings. It’s about $1mm in savings.
But what’s this…we can see the actual transactions.
Of the 4 outlays, the last outlay was made in Aug 2022, and there were no outlays in 2023 or 2024 despite the grant schedule showing all the $2.8mm should have been given out by Aug 2022.
It’s almost like the research, which completed in Aug 2024, didn’t need the entire $2.8mm that was allocated to it, and being legitimate researchers rather than liars and charlatans, only took the money they needed and left the $1mm for the government to use elsewhere.
Looks like the liars and charlatans are the people who created that table to make it look like they saved $2.8mm when in reality they saved $0, and the researches or this study you criticize actually saved the govt $1mm.
There’s no easier chump than someone who wants to be a chump.
This is a society ensuring it’s getting people to be interested in advanced science. I think thats some of the most noble things a country can do.
"It strikes me that many of the tech billionaires have already gotten their "upside" many times over from people like Engelbart and other researchers who were supported by ARPA, Parc, ONR, etc. Why would they insist on more upside, and that their money should be an "investment"? That isn't how the great inventions and fundamental technologies were created that eventually gave rise to the wealth that they tapped into after the fact.
"It would be really worth the while of people who do want to make money -- they think in terms of millions and billions -- to understand how the trillions -- those 3 and 4 extra zeros came about that they have tapped into. And to support that process." (from https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/).
Even before Trump's and DOGE's reckless attacks on research and academia, the software industry (I'm going to limit this to the software industry; I don't know the situation in other STEM industries such as health care, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, aerospace, etc.) has changed its strategy regarding funding research. Before the 2010s, many major companies had research labs where its employees worked on medium-term and long-term projects that may not have directly tied into current products but may form the basis of future products. If you had a computer science PhD and worked in an applied field such as systems or compilers, aside from academia and government labs, there were jobs at industrial labs where researchers could work on research systems. Sun, for example, had a lot of interesting research projects such as Self (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(programming_language) ; much of the work on Self influenced the design and implementation of the Java virtual machine). AltaVista, an early Web search engine that predates Google, was originally a research project at Digital Equipment Corporation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista) that was later spun off as its own company.
However, in the 2000s and especially in the 2010s, these jobs became increasingly rare. Having worked in industrial research labs and advanced development teams during the mid-2010s and early 2020s, what I've noticed is a trend away from dedicated research labs where researchers study phenomena and perhaps build prototypes that get passed onto a production team, and more toward a model where researchers are expected to write production code. Google's 2012 paper "Google's Hybrid Approach to Research" (https://research.google/pubs/googles-hybrid-approach-to-rese...) is an excellent summary. This makes a lot of sense under the context of early Google; Google in the 2000s needed to build large-scale distributed systems to power Google's search engine and other operations, but there was little experience within and outside the company on working on such Web-scale systems. Thus, Google hired CS PhDs with research experience in distributed systems and related topics, and then put them to work implementing systems such as MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, and many others. I see a similar mindset when it comes to AI companies such as OpenAI, where researchers directly work on production systems.
Researchers working directly on products that take advantage of research is an effective approach in many situations and it's brought us many innovations, especially in Web-scale systems, big data processing, and machine learning. However, not all research has obvious, direct productization opportunities. For one, not all computer science research is systems-based. There is theoretical computer science research, where researchers are exploring questions that may not immediately lead to new products, but may answer important questions regarding computing. Next, even in systems research, there are areas of research that could be productized a few decades down the road, but in order for those products to be created, the research needs to be done first. Deep neural networks took off once hardware became cheap enough to make DNN architectures feasible, for example. However, without the work done on neural networks in the decades prior to affordable GPUs, research on DNNs would be further behind compared to today.
The biggest problem that I see with attitudes regarding research funding, not just in industry, but also in academia and government, is that funders don't appreciate the fact that research is inherently risky; not all research projects are going to lead to positive results, and the lack of positive results is not a matter of a researcher's work ethic or competence. Funders seem to want sure bets; they seem to only be interested in funding research that has a very high ROI likelihood.
Yes, funders should have the freedom to fund the projects and researchers that they want. There are obvious reasons why funders are more interested in hot topics such as large language models and blockchain applications versus topics where there is less of an obvious likelihood for short-term ROI. However, I feel that it is important to fund less obviously lucrative research efforts. I feel industry is not interested these days in making more speculative bets, kind of like the research projects that Xerox PARC did back in the 1970s.
Academia seems like a natural home for more speculative research. Unfortunately academia has two major pressures that undermine this: (1) the "publish-or-perish" culture found at many major research universities, and (2) fundraising pressures. These two factors, in my opinion, encourage academics, especially pre-tenure and non-tenured ones, to optimize their research pursuits for "sure bets" instead of riskier but potentially higher impact work. The fundraising pressures have gotten much worse now with the abrupt cuts to research funding in the United States.
A long-term solution to this problem requires cultivating a culture that is more understanding of the research process, that research is inherently risky, and that different types of research require different funding mechanisms. I'm all in favor of Google- and OpenAI-style research projects where researchers are directly involved with product-building efforts, but I'm also in favor of other styles of research that are not directly tied to product-building. I also want to see a culture where large corporations and wealthy individuals donate meaningful amounts of money to fund research efforts.
It would be a major setback for society for us to return to the pre-1940s days of "gentlemen scientists" where science and other academic pursuits were only reserved for the independently wealthy and for those who relied on patronage. Modern technological innovations are made possible through research, and it's important that research efforts are funded in a regular manner.
My canonical example is Linus: if the world was fair he should be worth some pretty big numbers. It is harder to pick what is fair in return for someone's scientific innovation. I would guess Linus has generated as much worth as Microsoft, so in an ideal world he should be worth a Bill Gates. Linus has mostly chosen other non-financial goals to chase (unlike Bill). Linus $50 million, Bill Gates $156 billion.
Some people that complain about the wealthy making money are selfishly obsessed about money themselves. Perhaps even hypocritically denegrating others as too-money-focused when others choose to win the money making game.Unfortunately our world tends to be very focused on financial gains; and often completely ignoring non-financial benefits.
What are the non-financial benefits of an iPhone compared to the money paid for it?
How much is job-enjoyment or job-status worth; compared against either the money earned or the time spent?
Microsoft makes everything from game consoles to ERP systems while Linus created one part of an operating system and a source control system. Linus certainly captured less of the economic value he created than Microsoft’s founders shareholders but Microsoft has generated much, much more (economic) value.
Microsoft valued Github at over $7.5 billion in stock at acquisition.
git was developed by Linus, subsequently generating economic value for Microsoft.
What was git worth economically? Did Microsoft pay Linus for any of the value it received?
This causes me to think that what these people are actually paying for is GitHub, and not git.
Which causes me to think that, when Microsoft valued Github at over $7.5 billion, that value reflected the value of GitHub sans git.
Linus is in business of advancing the humanity, without making billions in the process. I can only salute him for that.
It’s an infrastructure that others build on.
These jobs became rare because academia took them. The pie may have grown or shrunk a bit but mostly what happened is that instead of running this stuff in house BigCo will sponsor or parter with some university lab or research program.
I haven't crunched the numbers but I suspect that they get better write offs this way.
You have to ride the waves. No one really controls them.
How much of a setback would this really be, though? The US government spent $200 billion of R&D in 2024. Of that $200 billion, $140 billion of it was military related which is probably not in danger. Including private spending, total r&d was around $900 billion. So even if the $60 billion of non-military government research spending was entirely eliminated, that would be only around a 7% decline in spending.
But still that would be bad. That $60 billion is a lot to replace from private funding. I don't know if it would be a net negative, though. It seems like privately funded research can seriously outperform government funding because when private actors fund research, they do it for the specific reason that they want the research done. Contrast this with public funding which has to meet a lot of political goals that have nothing to do with science. Look what SpaceX has been able to accomplish vs NASA. NASA has great scientists and engineers and a much bigger budget than SpaceX did, but the problem is that their rocket building program was more of a jobs program and a way to spread money to a lot of congressional districts than it was about building rockets. Whereas SpaceX had exactly one goal and that was to build rockets.
I also think that it's important to fund research in a regular manner, but is government a more reliable way than private patrons? It feels like its the opposite. If we had a government that really cared about science and committed to funding it in an effective way and never using it as a cover to funnel money to political causes I do think it would be better than relying on private funding, but when I read a list of cancelled grant like this it doesn't seem like we do. https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt...
Charitable foundations and similar organizations are not that different from government agencies funding research. They act on a smaller scale, because rich people are not actually that rich.
Then there are companies that do research as part of their business. They are typically much better funded and much narrower in scope than government-funded research. They are also biased towards topics that can be reasonably expected to work and produce economic value within the next 10-20 years. This kind of research is inherently inefficient due to redundant efforts. Instead of making their findings public, companies often keep the results secret, forcing their competitors to waste money on reinventing the wheel.
SpaceX has received substantial public investment in the form of contracts, infrastructure, and incentives so in essence SpaceX is benefiting the same way that you seem to abhor
>knows that our field’s landmark innovations emerged not purely from product roadmaps but from university labs with federal funding
Maybe if you cherry pick those innovations from things coming from university labs. Or count these labs because they openly announced something or popularized something else that already existed.
>The Talent Pipeline Under Threat
Talent can be taught by both AI and industry. University as a place for learning is an outdated concept.