domain:city-journal.org
hydroacetylene
1m ago
Did they have buddies with them?
hydroacetylene
5m ago
Did you pay with a credit card? Selling purchasing data by credit card companies is probably super-duper illegal but I'm pretty sure it happens.
hydroacetylene
6m ago
If I can tell it's AI I refuse to read it. I would prefer a hard ban on non-spoilered AI content and stringent restrictions on spoilered AI.
birb_cromble
9m ago
rather than something that genuinely would be the best move for the country
professors and students who tried to make the department officially pro-Palestine, admit a bunch of diversity PhD students who aren't up to snuff, and antagonize the administration
This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research.
So to avoid politicizing scientific research, we should water down the quality of the researchers and let a bunch of activists take over the institutions, and that would genuinely be the best move for the country?
Am I reading that right?
anti_dan
10m ago
The problem is the whole ecosystem is corrupt and tries to launder political propaganda by citing to things like Tao's work and other stuff like it. This is what happens when good people operate within a bad system, they become part of the problem.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11m ago
The headline is almost objectively a lie. It’s completely incompatible with the stat you quoted and so I suspect they are gaming the word “failure” to mean something most people don’t consider it to mean.
ThenElection
31m ago
If you're anticipating capex in the 13 figures, it's still surprising that large companies don't do more research on fundamentally different learning algorithms and hardware. Which isn't to say they don't (e.g. there are a couple researchers at GDM doing excellent work in neuromorphic and more brain-inspired learning), but I'd be surprised if the aggregate research spending among the big three on this (as opposed to tweaks to make transformers perform incrementally better) exceeds $1B/year. Any given research path is likely to not lead to anything, but the potential payoff is enormous.
zoink
32m ago
This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research.
If it's paid for by taxes it's political.
thejdizzler
39m ago
As someone in the sciences (doing my PhD at Hopkins) these cuts have hit us quite hard. The NSF has basically been dismantled, and the NIH funding system has become much more restrictive. To me, none of this makes a whole lot of sense. These grants were pennies on top of the giant stacks of dollars that the military, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security represent. Yes you get a bunch of duds, but a lot of the research funded has an extremely high ROI. I get that Trump wanted to shut down "woke" research, but he could have done that without cutting overall funding (just mandate that the NIH can't fund transgender research, shutdown the diversity grants, etc.).
This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research. Which I can't really blame the Trump administration for. It was the idiot professors and students who tried to make the department officially pro-Palestine, admit a bunch of diversity PhD students who aren't up to snuff, and antagonize the administration because they thought Trump was a fascist who started this whole thing.
So it seems to me once again a case of Trump punishing the people who tried to screw him over, rather than something that genuinely would be the best move for the country.
Supah_Schmendrick
41m ago
as there is still a long and ugly history of nasty jewish pedophiles making use of their jewishness to evade justice.
Correct, insofar as pedos (and many other sorts of criminals) seek to flee overseas to countries without easy extradition to the US. The Saudis, for example, seem to have something of a state policy of bailing out and whisking away their nationals away from American justice.
But I strongly suspect that all of this a rounding error being blown out of proportion because of who's involved. If there are base-rate statistics showing that jews are disproportionately likely to commit sex crimes, that would clearly indicate a problem. If there are statistics showing that that jews accused of crimes have disproportionately lower rates of conviction once charged, then that's likely a problem whether or not they are abusing aaliyah as the mechanism.
Otherwise it's just chinese cardiologists.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
45m ago
· Edited 41m ago
The main grant for IPAM is already unsuspended anyway (possibly because UCLA bent the knee).
Further, the grant DID fund DEI programs in the past, such as (from the latest annual report):
“PUNDiT: (P)racticum for (Und)ergraduates (i)n Number (T)heory” is a 2-day intensive program which will showcase number theory broadly interpreted at the introductory level. A goal of this program is to expose Southern California students traditionally underrepresented in number theory (such as women and historically marginalized minorities) to the beauty of the subject.
And as tracingwoodgrains points out, Tao already chose a side His complaints about "political directives" ring hollow.
Supah_Schmendrick
48m ago
Because anyone can be a sensationalist?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
53m ago
There are people who say "would" to Slaanesh daemonettes; fucking Eldar isn't even something they would blink at.
yunyun333
58m ago
Terence Tao: I’m an award-winning mathematician. Trump just cut my funding.
In just six months, the United States has seen a wholesale assault on the scientific infrastructure that helped make it a world leader in innovation. Grants have been cancelled mid-project, fellowships for the next generation of researchers gutted, and federally funded institutes stripped of the resources they need to operate. These decisions are not the result of scientific review or Congressional debate, but of abrupt political directives that bypass long-standing norms, disrupt multi-year projects, and erode the independence of our research ecosystem.
In that time, I have seen first-hand how sustained federal investment—channeled through agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF)—powers the collaborations that link universities, government laboratories, and industry. At UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), where I now serve as Director of Special Projects, those collaborations have laid the groundwork for both theoretical breakthroughs and practical technologies. My own research at IPAM, for instance, helped lead to the algorithms that now cut MRI scan times by a factor of up to 10. This is the America I chose as my adoptive home: a place where science is valued as a public good, and where researchers from around the world come to contribute their ideas and energy.
It is therefore stunning and devastating to discover that the new administration, in just its first six months, has deliberately attacked and weakened almost all the supporting pillars of this ecosystem. Executive actions have cancelled or suspended federal grants with unprecedented scale and speed, with billions of dollars worth of ongoing research projects and experiments disrupted. This is not because of a negative scientific assessment of the work, but instead by seemingly arbitrary justifications. Critical funding has been pulled for as insignificant a reason as the presence of a key word in the original proposal that is retroactively deemed unacceptable.
Federal support is, of course, a privilege, not a right; and Congress has the constitutional authority to set the budgets and rules for any expenditure of public funds and resources. But many of these executive actions have not waited for either explicit or implicit Congressional approval, and in some cases have even directly ignored past Congressional mandates for appropriations. Relative to the sheer size of the federal government as a whole, the amount allocated for supporting science is not massive. The NSF mathematics and physical sciences (MPS) directorate, for instance, is the largest of the subdivisions of the NSF, and has an annual budget of approximately $1.7 billion. This looks significant until one realizes that it amounts to about five dollars per US citizen per year, and less than a tenth of a percent of the federal budget as a whole.
He seems to be referring to how the admin took an axe to science funding by ctrl+F-ing for 'woke' dictionary terms: underrepresented, minority, diverse, etc. The problem is that the effects seem to be about indiscriminate regardless of whether you were a true believer or merely box checking. Will we see upgraded diversity science pledges in the next democrat admin? Researchers might have to carefully consider the political leanings of their funding proposals in election years.
Well of course you think that. On the Empathising-Systemising scale categorising interest in people vs. interest in things (linked here due to your previously stated interest in psychometric testing) you are probably very strongly skewed towards the former. Most people here, including me, are not.
I'm personally not interested in effervescence or projection or power for power's sake, I'm interested in knowledge; I find the idea of understanding more about the universe we live in to be an inherently interesting and valiant goal, the existence of other minds not necessary. And unlike faceh I don't take it as a given that we're probably alone (and in fact think it is likely we are not).
That being said I see the study of human minds, human biology, etc as being of immense value as well. Porque no los dos?
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