garden_hermit

I would expect a general rise in productivity across sectors, but with the largest concentrated in the tech sector given the focus on code generation. A proliferation of new apps, new features, and new functionalities at a quicker pace than pre-AI. Given the hype, one would expect an inflection point in the productivity of this sector, but it mostly just appears linear.

I am very willing to believe that there are many obscure and low-quality apps being generated by AI. But this speaks to the fact that mere generation of code is not productive, that generating quality applications requires other forms of labor that is not presently satisfied by generative AI.

This just returns us to the question — if it makes all these things so easy and fast, where are the AI-generated apps? Where is the productivity boost?

> Given the repeatability crisis I keep reading about, maybe something should change?

The replication crisis — assuming that it is actually a crisis — is not really solvable with peer review. If I'm reviewing a psychology paper presenting the results of an experiment, I am not able to re-conduct the entire experiment as presented by the authors, which would require completely changing my lab, recruiting and paying participants, and training students & staff.

Even if I did this, and came to a different result than the original paper, what does it mean? Maybe I did something wrong in the replication, maybe the result is only valid for certain populations, maybe inherent statistical uncertainty means we just get different results.

Again, the replication crisis — such that it exists — is not the result of peer review.

Have you ever went running with a dog? Dogs can go fast over a short distance but they overheat quickly. People just keep on running way past the time the dog has collapsed.

Generally speaking, foreign students subsidize public universities by paying full sticker price for tuition, whereas US students are either in state (paying less) or often receive scholarships and support.

Foreign students are not stealing “slots” from Americans. If anything, their tuition dollars make more slots available.

This disaster was exactly predicted by a ton of people, with foresight! To treat this as an unexpected outcome belies the exact lack of seriousness that characterized this whole ordeal

The issue is that head of the HHS has led a years-long campaign against vaccines built atop shit-tier science and outright misinformation, and is part of a political movement that is growing increasingly anti-vaccine.

There is a clear possibility that the results will be cooked or otherwise fraudulent because the secretary will not take "no link" for an answer. Even if such a study is obviously deeply flawed or rigged, the damage it would do to public acceptance of vaccines would be unparalleled, measured in thousands (and likely more) of dead children.

The thing is that people like Thiel are actually quite smart. The problem is that people really overrate “smartness”. Smart people are often dumb as hell.

tbf, many materialists dislike the "degrees of consciousness" idea because a theory that posits "consciousness is on a spectrum" is one that starts to resemble panpsychism, which they consider magical woo.

Thats fine for a sofrware startup because it fundamentally doesn't matter. Who cares if your silly website fails after you experiment, no one gets seriously hurt.

Shutting off the government means that things can be irreparably damaged. Losing a generation of scientists because of random cullings at the NSF will have effects for decades.

In the worst case, "moving fast and breaking things" with the government will kill people. For example, many patients were kicked off clinical trials during the NIH funding freeze. Abroad, the end of PEPFAR could kill untold numbers of people.

The indirect is a negotiated flat rate that covers costs that would be too numerous or difficult to account for in the direct costs. Like how would you as a researcher budget a fractionalized portion of access to a supercomputer cluster in each and every grant you need? You would need to hire new accountants just to handle this! The indirect rate is basically covering the whole infrastructure of research at a university. In theory all could be put into direct costs but…again…we get to tremendously difficult accounting

The interest is already what they are using. That is what all these scholarships and endowed chairs and so on are paid with.

The insane thing of all this is that the 1% being cut is almost entirely in investments: money for research that drives economic growth, money for the USAID that provides the US influence around the world, cuts to CDC staff that could help mitigate expensive pandemics…the list goes on.

So not only is the DOGE affair not reducing the debt, it is setting the country up for less wealth and more expenses in the future.

Ah, you see, Right Wing government is when economy go up. If economy no go up, it no right wing government.

Institutions tend to define diversity broadly, including diversity in terms of race, nationality, gender, socioeconomic status, and so on. I don't talk much about race or gender in my own statements, instead focusing on first-generation students and socio-economic status. This seems not to have hurt me.

I get that the way people think about these statements is different than the way they actually are; I just think people are wrong and that their impression is informed by social media. If it helps, I would be happy to rebrand "DEI Statement" to "Don't be an asshole and also try to keep the peace with everyone Statement".