Posted by yowzadave 3 days ago
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
This is an incredibly obnoxious and uninformed comment. NASA does not hire incompetent people because of "diversity".
> The parallel with Hitler really does not apply. The US won't be sending scientists working on nuclear weapons, stealth aircraft or profitable endeavors like GPUs.
Also an uninformed comment. The physicists that came to the US and UK and then worked on weapons programs were not for the most part working on weapons programs in Germany. They were just able to transfer those skills into the Manhattan Project, radar, or other programs.
What this pullback in US scientific funding does is reduce the number of those shots on goal. It undoes what the US prioritized from World War II onwards: that scientific innovation is foremost a strategic asset, not strictly a moneymaking venture. You saw that on display with the recent B-2 sorties over Iran: those could not have happened if not for highly specialized researchers slowly contributing to that body of work over decades.
Geoff Hinton couldn't get a job doing AI research in his native UK, so he moved to the US, where there were a lot more opportunities. At that time, neural networks weren't seen as particularly promising. Decades later, it paid off big. That's the kind of thing that will happen less and less (or work in reverse, with US researchers taking jobs overseas) since there will be far fewer funding opportunities.
You can't comment like this on HN, no matter what you're replying to. We've had to ask you before to avoid personal swipes in comments, going back many years. Please take a moment to remind yourself of the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.
Silicon Valley, the population of ordinary people residing there, 10 years ago (2015), heaved diversity. In corporate employment, it took decades to break through gender and race ceilings in industry to various degrees, but it largely happened, mostly, for better or worse.
Bringing together people, capital, opportunity, and academia creates a vibrant ecosystem that mutually reinforces further gains in a "virtuous" cycle. What doesn't create much is having only a few people spread out without a support system. It takes encouraging a mix of many open minded people within a smaller physical or digital proximity in order to get the w00w00 effect. That can't really happen when people are told they're not welcome.
What's the meaning of "heaved diversity" here?
I think I agree with the rest of your comment, about the concentration of varied talent being important.
I don’t dismiss the premise of the article and I think it is a shame how these organizations are being impacted, but I don’t know that these are the best exemplars of cutting edge science being shut down that will lead to America’s downfall from its scientific perch.
The world of privately funded research organizations like Bell Labs is long gone, with companies being barely able to look past the next quarter never mind being willing to invest in long term research that may not pay off for a few decades, if it pays off at all. And by definition most cutting edge science has that kind of financial time horizon. If there was an obvious, short term path to directly benefiting those conducting it, it's probably not very cutting edge at all and closer to engineering than actual scientific research. Not that there is anything wrong with that, we need engineering investment too. But it's not a replacement for science research.
I think a lot of people who scoff at the idea of government being on the cutting edge of science research don't understand how that research is being conducted. Sure, some of it is done by actual government employees, but especially for organizations like the NSF, the bulk of the research is being done by organizations and individuals outside of government who are simply given a check to look into things that might not immediately pay off or which have major societal benefit but no real path to commercial payoff.
E.g. designing scientific instruments. The fundamental physics and chemistry can be well understood, and yet you need a strong overlap of scientists and engineers to produce and run something that actually collects useful data, especially at the cutting edge, where new things actively need to be discovered and built to achieve the desired capability. Another growing one is using AI to drive scientific discovery (e.g. sifting through the terabytes of data being generated everyday and identifying things of potential interest), it isn't strictly an engineering problem, as the entire point is that you don't fully know what you are/are not looking for.
There's a reason most of the things I mentioned also hire plenty of physicists.
If a team of engineers find a cool new algorithm to make computer vision easier, we learnt something new about the world in the process. On the flip-side, you actually have plenty of research in fields you would consider science, eg. physics, that do not use the scientific method at all, but instead deduce possibilities based on mathematical modelling.
They are, but the article asserts, without evidence, that the US, like Nazi Germany, has passed a threshold where it is going to lose its preeminence in scientific research.
Then you simply aren't familiar with their work. These (plus NIH, DOE, DOD etc.) are the engines of a large portion of the world's science.
The engine is starved and it is going to destroy American industry.
The problem is that not all cutting edge science is "sexy". NOAA and NASA are doing some _really_ cool stuff with weather monitoring / climate predicting. Sexy? Arguably no. Unless the weather app on your phone is sexy.
Important? I'd argue that it's critical that we keep getting better at it.
the article is meant to educate and inform, so inform the reader, who might know that fact, of it and some evidence to characterize the dynamic.
when you preach to the choir, you miss a chance to widen the circle of empathy.
That’s true—all the brightest bulbs are working at FAANG companies building advertising delivery services, or at Fintech companies figuring out how to gamble faster.
They fund a lot of the foundational work that doesn't get a lot of resources from the private sector. 99% of new drugs approved between 2010 and 2019 relied on NIH funding.
Most of these agencies do some foundational science but maybe more importantly they collect lots of boring data. Boring data they give out to researchers for free. They also hand out grants which might not be lottery tickets but they pay for boring stuff.
The current administration believes that if you stop measuring any problem it ceases to be a problem. No one can push back on their flood of bullshit about everything if there's no data to point to. Authoritarians despise objective reality and empirical measurement and will always strive to make it easier to push their bullshit narratives.
True, most are just bloated bureaucracies serving their own self interests