throw-23

> Sabine got her wish. DOGE cut NSF by 40%.

You think that was her wish? Typical situation is "We only get X, too much of it goes to Y, which is bad for Z". Of course X is not negotiable in an upwards direction, Y is some entrenched status-quo that's difficult to change, and Z is lots and lots of stuff. Everyone who cares about Z attacks Y because they can't increase X and don't expect they can decrease it (although sometimes just calling attention to the zone does that anyway).

DOGE is/was stupid and awful, not for their mission, but because of their methods, missing skill sets, sheer repugnant criminality, etc. As a general rule in any push for efficiency you'll be way better off exercising a little creative intelligence rather than doing straight austerity anyway. And while I don't think the entire government should be run like a business, why isn't more of it self-funding? So maybe let serious people with good intentions at NASA or NSF do DOGE-style work, creating tech or process that cuts costs for other less intellectually-gifted sections of the government, and then let them keep half of what they save the tax payers. Half of what they save could triple their budget! It's not ideal to use our best and brightest this way honestly, but house on fire, you work with what you have at hand.

It might not seem like it, but I really am on your team. What you're missing and Sabine understands is that there is no such thing as spending that's insignificant, and whether we're talking cash or mission bandwidth, everything has opportunity costs. Exactly how many possible missions are thrown out every time we decide to send squishy humans instead of robots?

As for defense spending, to be clear I'm all for swapping the pentagon/nasa budgets, but afterwards I'd still call bullshit if I think there's gross mismanagement at NASA. Pandering to the public with space-selfies is mismanagement, even if it's brought on by desperation and shrinking budgets. I think there's a strong argument Webb was also is bad strategy / mismanagement, but it's too long to get into here.

Unfortunately, like everyone else, NASA, NSF et al do need to worry about public trust, ROI, and the dreaded question: What have you done for me lately? There's this idea that basic research must be incompatible with that sort of thing, but I disagree.

As someone who is actually (still) a fan of basic research, Artemis looks like a fun time for the 1% with a $100 billion dollar price tag, except that since it's only 4 astronauts and support staff, it's less than 1%. I opposed messing with NASA funding for a long time, but arguments referencing spin-off tech and so on wear thin. Spin-off occurring lately would/could only be captured by existing billionaires anyway, and without much benefit for society in general.

Humans in space are currently still a waste of time/money, largely just a big surrender to PR, space-selfies, the attention economy, and the general emphasis on "seem not be" you see elsewhere. Please just send robots, build a base, and let us know when we can put more than ~10 freaking people up there at one time. If that fails, then at least we'll have results in robotics research that can be applicable elsewhere on Earth right now as well as help us achieve the more grand ambitions later.

House is on fire, has been for a while, fuck business as usual. I honestly think all those smart people ought to be charged with things like using their operations research to improve government generally, or with larger-scale high tech job programs. If you don't want to let NASA big-brains try to fix healthcare, we could at least let them fix the DMV. Hell, let them keep their spin-offs too, so they actually want success, and have some part of their budget that won't disappear. Basic research and fundamental science is (still) something we need, but we need to be far more strategic about it.

Food for thought: The way things are going, we can definitely look forward to a NASA that's completely transformed into an informal, but publicly funded, research/telemetry arm for billionaire asteroid-mining operations, and thus more of the "public risk, private-profits" thing while we pad margins for people who are doing fine without the help. OTOH, if NASA is running asteroid mining businesses at huge profits, then they can do whatever they want with squishy volunteers as a sideshow, and maybe we'll have enough cash left over to fund basic income.

If you're interested in truth and not principles, why do you bring up principles? If you're interested in principles, why do you expect them from skeptics but not from boosters?

> I don't know why it is important to be unprincipled about it?

Well, making new mathematical errors while trying to point out someone else's math errors isn't unprincipled. Even in the face of errors, it's implicit that things like transparency and data-driven decisions are considered desirable.

The next point is superficial, but I think you'll find that it tracks in general. Consider 3 headlines and how much discourse really boils down to this type of messaging: "AI can make you rich!" vs "Use AI or be left behind!" vs "AI Industry is Lying to You".

The substance behind the headlines may or may not tell you something true about the world. At the same time, only the last headline/content seems even remotely concerned with principles, implying in this case that lying is bad. The other two are just seeking to spur interest and motivation with greed or with fear.

Ed can come across as agitated and shrill, and I never stop picturing him as exactly like Jude Law's character in Contagion. But. He's still an important counterpoint to the unexamined mainstream junk, which says more about the world than about him or his style. As we've seen play out with other areas of discourse, the middle shrinks, we're forced into a dialectic tug of war between absurdly polarized extremes, and it all comes to crisis. We might rediscover caution, epistemic humility, compromise and middle-ground, but only after rising absurdity and then some kind of punishment