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I have considered myself fairly libertarian, and have voted for libertarians in various positions for years. I think this is a bit like saying "I have a question for Republicans" or "I have a question for Democrats"--you'll get disparate answers depending on who you ask.

I am not opposed to taxes, and support them. Libertarianism is not anarchism. I think government programs should exist, and do well.

My informal theory is that there are two types of libertarians, or two dimensions to it, one regulatory and one financial. I see myself as extremely deregulatory, but not against taxes. So, e.g., I am not opposed to a single payer health care system, with concomitant taxes to pay for it, but am also in favor of massive health care and drug deregulation. Obviously in such a system the government would have to establish rules for itself (in terms of what it would support and would not) but I don't see why that would have to prevent someone else privately from doing something else.

I'm kind of a democrat-leaning libertarian, though, in that I usually (always in the past, but not by principle) vote for democrats when I don't vote for libertarians.

My salient political principle is really about injecting competition into society. Sometimes that might mean government services and/or intervention (where private industry is failing to provide a service or meet a need, or where monopolies exist), and sometimes it might mean massive deregulation (where the government plays favorites through regulatory capture--my definition of regulatory capture being very broad compared to many). So far I haven't found a party that matches my outlook well, although libertarianism in general has maybe been closest.

So, as tenured faculty I don't know about NSF advocating for careers in STEM. Maybe that's a good thing maybe its a bad thing.

What I do see driving this ultimately is something broader and more systemic, which is universities being underfunded, administrator heavy, and being run as for-profit businesses.

In many ways, this all reduces to how grants are awarded and funded, and the history of grant funding.

Through the 80s and 90s, and to some extent early 2000s, federal grant funding increased. There was sort of a heydey in that time, depending on field, where there was good funding opportunities, in general, for faculty.

At the same time, state funding to universities started decreasing, and costs started increasing due to the higher ed bubble. Because of indirect costs on grants, which allow universities to charge the federal gov a blanket percentage of a grant, universities were able to skim off a profit almost automatically. It was a sort of win-win it seemed because faculty got to fund their research, unis got a cut to offset decreased funding.

The problems are many, though. First, federal funding went down after a peak, so this money pool dried up. Second, this system sort of led to the pyramid scheme you mention, where grad students get recruited to maintain grants and research programs with nowhere to go, lest universities and faculty lose indirect funding. Third, it prioritizes research based on grant receipts rather than utility, which distorts research priorities in a perverse way (especially given nepotism in grant culture, which has been written about extensively elsewhere). Finally, because of the history of all of this, you kind of end up with a system in which those running the system are either beneficiaries of the 90s and 2000s, and don't realize what it is like now, or came up through that system and have a kind of survivorship bias.

Agencies like NSF and NIH are basically just maintaining any semblance of research in the US at the moment, making up for all the deficiencies that are occurring at the state level.

There are problems with NSF and NIH, but they're not with advocating for STEM grads. They're with how grants are funded. Basically, review panels need to randomly rotate in some kind of jury pool system almost; grants need to be awarded based on some kind of lottery system (proposed by former heads of NIH); indirect cost charges need to be eliminated or made line-item justified; some grants need to be awarded on the basis of publication record without regard to a specific proposal (ala Hungary); universities need to be adequately funded outside of the grant system; and tenure needs to be protected (I say this as someone who is probably going to step down from my tenured position soon).

The problems facing grad students and postdocs are just the tip of the iceberg. They don't end, even when you get a tenure-track position, and even when you get tenure. The system is broken, it's a mess that favors hype and popularity over rigor. What you end up with is the current reproducibility crisis, academic fraud, people manipulating the system to overclaim credit, and many more problems that society is unaware of because they have a stereotyped idea of what happens in science--the sort of "great man in the lab with a eureka moment" which is a false model of scientific process.

The problem is that the "elites" often selectively push for aspects of deregulatory strategy that benefit them, without pushing for the rest. Or, they advocate for some distorted version of it that no longer is deregulatory. And then on top of it is social conservativism.

For me, the Trump administration and current GOP has been a good example of this. I am the last person you'd identify as a Trump supporter, but there are policies (e.g., FDA deregulation, maybe some school deregulation) that I think would be healthy. But overall, the policies being pushed by his administration and the party pick and choose things so that the libertarian approach gets grossly distorted. In general, I am libertarian, but I don't trust the GOP to implement it, because often what you end up with is some Frankenstein monster of policy that is more fascist than libertarian.

Too often, good policy theory--whether more libertarian or socialist--get distorted by the time they get to actual politicians. "Capitalized profit, socialized risk" is what you get as a result.

On another note, I don't see this as a series of angry platitudes--many of the points they're making have been made elsewhere in more rigorous outlets. This is a piece that's trying to explain the principles to others.

And I worry that what we often need as a society as dismissed as "angry classism" when it's just really anger, because people are suffering.

I work in health care and I am acutely aware of the problems with licensure and regulation. There are reams of unnecessary regulations that increase costs, and there is a strong regulatory capture regime in the form of regulations that put physicians at a top of a hierarchy, that result in huge cost increases due to lack of competition. There have been volumes of studies showing, for example, that this hierarchical decision-making system is actually less safe, and that many roles currently legislated to physicians or other providers could be done by still other providers, such as optometrists, pharmacists, psychologists, and other providers.

What I see, though, is whenever someone suggests deregulating health care, there are cries of "you're trying to decrease safety for economic benefit." It's absurd to me because the current regulations are often not based on any scientific studies, and when there are studies, they often suggest the regulations are unnecessary, or decrease safety. But at the same time, I understand these source of these concerns, because when deregulation happens, it often happens selectively, in such a way to benefit a small few at the expense of many.

I'm very depressed by health care debates in the US, because they often are reduced to discussions about socialized versus capitalized payment systems, with little to no discussion of alternative regulatory systems, or transparency. To me, working in the field, the question of who pays huge costs is a symptom, not a cause, of problems in the system. I was very supportive of Obamacare, not because I saw it as the best solution, but because I hoped it would force politicians to start addressing sources of cost, especially the GOP who should be all about deregulation. Instead, they failed their opportunity, and turned it back to useless discussions about who should pay.

The issue of control with newsfeeds and RSS has been on my mind a lot the last year or so.

RSS and Atom are great as a protocol, but where things break down for me is in discovery, filtering, and selection of content.

There's a few traditional RSS/Atom readers I like, because I have complete control over the feeds I monitor. The problem with this is that then I have complete control over the feeds, and have no way to be alerted to content I might have otherwise missed. I think this is part of the "unread feed overload" problem mentioned by some others, that I just a firehose of feeds at me, with no prioritization of content.

The other end are more curated things, like Feedly. This is great, because I get alerted to things that are popular, but they're very centralized, and it seems like the more you get curation, the less often you're able to customize your feeds. Also, for whatever reason, with the curated systems, it seems like you kind of get the same things over and over again from different systems, like there's a set of feeds they all dip into and don't deviate from.

This is my ideal in an RSS/Atom reader (not saying it's realistic):

1. Open source

2. Good UI

3. Can import and export using OPML or other similar standard open format

4. Cross-platform, between desktop and mobile

5. Decentralized feed recommendation

The last part is where things go a little off the beaten path, which is that it would be nice to have some way to get introduced to popular content without it going through some centralized service, like a recommendation system that's decentralized.

The coverage of the Netflix ratings format switch has always been frustrating to me because what people are complaining about (you're not the only one; https://www.polygon.com/2017/4/7/15212718/netflix-rating-sys...) was predictable from the beginning.

I do research in this area and it's fairly well established that when you go from something like five points to two points with ratings, you throw away tons of information. There's diminishing returns with numbers of points, but as you go lower you lose information.

The "ratings don't matter because what you want is implicit signals from peoples' actual behavior" is also disingenous because the rating behavior is a behavior that's directly tied to the stimulus in question. Not saying that indirect behavioral correlates aren't useful, only that the rating is a very powerful, direct correlate that tends to be very specific. Going back to the topic of the thread, sure, all those Facebook likes are going to be useful in predicting how much you like a candidate, but you're sure as hell going to get a lot of information by just asking them "on a scale of 1 to 5, how much do you approve of X?"

I had a similar reaction. It strikes me a bit as part of the rampant survivorship bias that happens all the time in contemporary society. As in, I worked hard and things worked out, therefore if you work hard things will work out, and if you didn't, you weren't doing something valuable or working hard enough.

I don't know that I disagree with the author so much about social media platforms like Facebook per se, but I disagree with some implicit premise they're making.

The reason why things like blogs and social media presence are advertised so much is precisely because "value" really means something like perceived value, which depends on things like awareness. That is, it's not really so much whether or not what you do has value, its whether or not people are aware of you and perceive it as having value. So to get eyeball time, you need to put yourself out there.

I'm also a tenured professor, and what I increasingly see is popularity driving things, rather than value. That is, the rigor of academic work seems less and less important than the splashiness of it. The colleagues I know whose careers have taken off have done so precisely because they manipulate the social aspect of it--they're politicians more than scientists or mathematicians.

In this regard, there seems to be something disingenuous and dangerous about the general sentiment being expressed. To me, it generally seems to be dismissing the sociopolitical aspect of how we reward work, sweeping it under the rug, which will only worsen our problems.

I'm having flashbacks here, but what I remember at that time was concern that if Google paid Sun, they'd be setting a precedent that way. There was a sigh of relief when they didn't, at least from some, because, regardless of how much better of a company Sun was than post-Sun Oracle, people felt like it was overreaching.

So although you're correct that Google did this themselves, the alternative was fraught with problems also. Better to fight it and lose than implicitly accept the idea and pay.

This was all happening in the context of C#, which people seem to be forgetting about too. It's important to remember that the whole idea of copyrightable API was done under the argument that it was important to protect API integrity from forks. MS provided evidence of a desire to do this (as has Google to some extent since then) but then introduced C# instead.

Anyway, this is a mess because copyrightable API is ridiculous, but Google should have been more careful with cleanroom implementations.