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".

I defend it on the grounds that it is basic human management. The scientific workforce is diverse, and this diversity introduces potential conflicts. Money spent on researchers who cannot effectively keep the peace among their students and staff—whether through negligence, naiveté, or outright malice—is likely to go to waste. It is not entirely a re-tooling of HR legal speak, but rather an extension given what we know about how to manage a diverse workforce.

The rubric I use to judge diversity statements, and which is often formalized in rubrics, is: "has the applicant thought about this at all to the point that they have specific experiences and strategies that lead us to trust that they could effectively manage a diverse population of students and staff".

There is nothing arcane about this. To the extent that diversity statements even factor in review, this is the same criteria that everyone I know follows.

In my own applications, I, as a white guy, have been very successful in getting jobs and funding. This is despite never making ideological commitments and barely talking about gender or race, and instead focusing on first-generation students. Just showing that I have put in a minimal amount of thought into working with diverse students and colleagues seems to be enough.

In almost every case I've seen, the statements are in fact worded in terms of specific contributions. The most general terminology I've seen is requesting the candidate to explain their role "advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion"—to which the best statements respond with (1) their experiences with diverse classrooms/staff, and (2) their specific strategies for approaching these issues.

I have not really encountered instructions that I would misconstrue to be an ideological litmus test, and the majority of submissions that I have reviewed do not in fact talk about the candidate's ideological priors.

I think that researchers from China, India, and so one should also have plans to effectively manage the diverse set of students and staff they are likely to work with while in the U.S.

You are interpreting this through a really uncharitable lens. That statement is not about ideology, the whole premise is stewardship of taxpayer funds.

If a grad student is funded on the project but gets pushed out because of toxic culture, discrimination, or some other kind of marginalization, then that is a waste of research funds and slows down research. Successful teams need to be able to work together effectively and mitigate conflicts. People are diverse, and conflicts are likely to arise because of this: anyone running a research team needs a plan to manage their team, just as they need a plan to manage their data. Its boring HR stuff that is necessary in a diverse society.

I have written what you would likely call "DEI" statements for grants and job applications, and I have reviewed them as well.

The absolutely worst statements are the people who believe that the statement is an ideological litmus test. It never was, and it isn't.

These statements, to a one, are basic HR stuff: discuss your strategies and experiences to not be an asshole and ensure that the diverse people you manage (and they almost certainly are diverse) will be able to get along and work effectively under your management. Boring stuff.

People think its some sort of ideological purity test, write it as such, and get surprised when the statement is evaluated poorly.

That description really does a disservice to Cowan's work. A more general argument was that:

- Prior to the industrial revolution, men's and women's work was distinct, but reciprocal—they both contributed towards the general maintenance of a home (farming, animal care, cooking, cleaning, chopping wood, repair, etc.)

- With the industrial revolution, men left for work, leaving many women solely responsible for nearly all home-based tasks. Household tasks became associated with women's work.

- Over time, electric appliances reduced the necessary labor to perform their household tasks. However, shifting expectations of motherhood and cleanliness standards resulted in less time saved than you would expect. Before washing machines, clothes were cleaned only seldomly, but with them, it became a weekly or even daily task.

The domestic workers part of the book is real and was common, but I'd hesitate to use it to exemplify the overall argument of the book.

It shouldn't be democratic, but for a non-democratic institution, the Supreme Court in the U.S. has outsized power at a level not originally intended in the constitution.

Wouldn't the evidence of inflation occurring in other countries suggest that COVID is its primary driver, rather than a specific monetary policy? (though it does seem that the scale of inflation in the U.S. is a little higher than elsewhere)

See for example:

UK: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/boe-chief-economist-says-uk...

Australia: https://www.reuters.com/business/australia-core-inflation-sp...

China: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-factory-gate-infl...

Germany: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-inflation-could-...

Brazil: https://www.reuters.com/article/brazil-economy-inflation/upd...

The author raises some very good points about the dangers of science in the public sphere, particularly how scientific debates can be co-opted by pundits and cause social media outrage.

However, I simply can't read the article without recognizing the context of its author: John P. Ioannidis.

For those who don't know, Ioannidis was widely criticized early in the pandemic for his studies on the effects of lockdowns [1]. This essay seems, in part, a response to that criticism. But contrary to his writing,

1. He was widely criticized for his work by peer scientists [2], not just the public, not just for the rigour of his work, but also for his personal conduct.

2. He made the choice to share his ideas on Fox news, essentially entering the public debate himself [3], and willingly exposing himself to public scrutiny

3. His work has not been censored. It remains in major scientific journals and is highly-cited! He quotes "organized skepticism" like he just read Merton the night before, acting like it has somehow vanished during the pandemic, and yet his actual scientific work remains firmly within the scholarly discourse, its the public scrutiny that he doesn't like.

So I am not sure exactly what his point is. The "science" seems to be working as well as it ever did, with a wide variety of research and viewpoints being published. Public controversy reaching scientists is its own issue and one that I'm sympathetic towards, but I feel that Ioannidis is a poor spokesperson for this issue, and his personal grievances bleed into his writing.

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...

[2] https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1263296963627356161?lan...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/12/16/john-ioan...

I'm not talking about buying a 2 ton truck or flying across the Atlantic, or owning a big house. I'm talking about people needing to get groceries.

I would prefer that infrastructure in the U.S. were more dense, that less people were not required to drive everywhere. But the reality is that, as life in many parts of the U.S. is currently set up, people cannot rely on bicycling as a safe, efficient, and effective means of transportation in their daily lives. Biking, if you live in a place that supports it, is good, but telling people to "just bike" remains a useless and naive plan for addressing climate change. Your energy will be better spent elsewhere.

I'm curious what kind of town you live in. I grew up in a rural area, in which google claims its a 50 minute bike ride to the nearest grocery store, along curvy & hilly country roads with absolutely no sidewalks, let alone bike lanes, and where monstrous pickup trucks are liable to sideswipe you out of spite as much as accident.

My sister lives in a suburb in Florida: better, but the weather is unbearable for half the year. She also has three children, making carrying sufficient groceries in a bike pretty much impossible.

If people can bike, they should. But a lot of people live in these sorts of conditions that are not conducive to biking, enough that "just bike to the grocery store" is not a realistic or achievable goal.

try this one out:

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Integration-Parado...

Studies mostly show that, in the long run, family-based immigration policies lead to more economic growth than the "best and brightest". Basically, forming immigrant communities is useful—they provide support to new entrants, and lead to better outcomes for everyone. Importing a few educated doctors, rather than families or broader populations, leads to less long-term benefit.

Whats wrong with some people having many kids, if the average still remains low?

There is sort of a 2-faced nature here. Scienitsts themselves should be maintaining intense skepticism over even the most fundamental beleifs of their field. Here is the "science as a process" that is constantly changing.

However, science also plays a role in public life, where it might make a lot more sense to appeal to the authority and the track record of science. Here is the "science as a set of truths".

Separating the two is difficult though. Some scientists will inevitably become dogmatic about theories in their own field, whereas some in the public will take advantage of internal scientific debates to cast doubt on the whole thing.