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The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Do we condemn Kolmogorov?
Scott doesn't. I do.
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
Wow, that really sucks.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
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.).
The problem is that there isn't only some single class of "diversity grants". Every grant has some sort of DEI stuff written into it, including the main IPAM grant. It's a Gordian knot tying research to DEI, and there's only one way to deal with those.
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
Some major realizations about culture when I was a teen reading The Diamond Age on lunch at the job I had then. Just looking at the cover takes me right back even though I've read that book at least ten times now.
birb_cromble
2d ago
That makes more sense. Thank you.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Scientists are born subjects.
If the delusional fever dreams of democrat true believer karens come true and a Christian theocracy rises to power, the scientific establishment will simply publish appendixes to their papers reconciling them to the current state of creation research. Woke is the same damn thing. Trump should be demanding they include 'murica, fuck yeah! loyalty pledges instead of yeeting them for kowtowing.
thejdizzler
2d ago
Sorry I think my response was a bit confusing because I don't want to pin the blame solely on Trump for this. Universities have played with fire for a long time and somehow seem surprised to be getting burnt. I just lament that the administration seems to be cutting down the tree rather than pruning some of the worst branches. We can punish woke without destroying the research apparatus.
ThenElection
2d ago
Isn't UCLA's math department built on ancestral and unceded land violently stolen from the Tongva by white settler colonialists? By actually dismantling oppressive structures instead of just giving lip service, Trump is implementing the woke program.
I'm a bit more sympathetic to Tao: he lives and works in a milieu where not signing that letter would have made many of his colleagues and students (maybe even his wife) shun him; and if he didn't, he would absolutely have been hounded and targeted to to make some statement because of his stature. He still had more agency in the matter than most, but it's a mitigating factor. Do we condemn Kolmogorov?
there342
2d ago
The Science chose to align itself with wokeness, and it put itself in the crosshairs. How many people who knew better, within this scientific infrastructure, held their tongues when we were told covid would not spread if you were protesting for racial justice? How much serious rigor goes into racial justice narratives that justify a need for more black doctors, damn the merit? Science is subject to pressures that betray its very purpose, and there seems to be no interest in stopping these threats from within. Eventually, you're going to draw attention from an outside force, when the corrupting element becomes a driving force.
With that in mind, the fact of the matter is that anyone who's pro-America and pro-"Science" just doesn't seem to have much in the way of common goals these days. Science's first loyalty is to academia, not the country. And academia is dominated by a culture of rootless cosmopolitanism, which doesn't see any special value in any particular country (least of all America). I have extreme doubt as to The Science's commitment to America being a world leader in anything when they only ever kowtow to their humanities overlords in lieu of fact-finding - overlords who typically hold America in absolute contempt. There's obvious value in science and all, but if they wanted America's unconditional support, they should have been more willing to bat for America themselves when they had the chance.
birb_cromble
2d ago
I finally got a body with an appropriately specced neck pocket for my parts bass project. It's a fairly light mahogany three piece.
Now I'm on to the neck itself. I'm going back and forth between an inline four headstock or a 2+2 setup. I think I prefer the latter. Does anyone here have experience with roasted maple? The claims on stability in shifting temps and humidity sounds fantastic.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2d ago
The write up is almost completely dishonest in its spin. Here is a copy of the report itself. Don’t consider this any kind of actual statistic, even the authors hide behind “directionally accurate” and contradict themselves within a single paragraph.
“Only 5% of custom enterprise AI tools reach production” becomes a “95% failure rate for enterprise AI systems” a paragraph later and then there’s the so-called “research note” that says “We define successfully implemented for task-specific GenAl tools as ones users or executives have remarked as causing a marked and sustained productivity and/or P&L impact”.
These three statements are not the same and occur within three successive paragraphs. I think if you read the report there are some useful broad strokes stuff but any specific claim is methodological trash.
Well of course you think that. I imagine that on the EQ and SQ tests, assessing interest in people and interest in things (linked here due to your previously stated interest in psychometric testing) you would probably be 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). It just so happens that this lofty scientific goal dovetails well with the imperative for expansion, and hedging against X-risks.
That being said I see the study of human minds, human biology, etc as being of immense value as well. Porque no los dos? There's value in expanding one's sphere of knowledge in more than one domain at a time.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Did they have buddies with them?
hydroacetylene
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d ago
This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research.
If it's paid for by taxes it's political.
thejdizzler
2d 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
2d 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.
2d ago
· Edited 2d 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
2d ago
Because anyone can be a sensationalist?
(((Scottish)))
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