People don't tend to buy people large furniture because it's rude to assume that theyll want to keep something large and relatively permanent, much less something that requires an electrician to install.
In human and development, there is a transition from remembering things verbatim to remembering using semantic concepts. The ideas are getting bigger and more useful. The details are still in the library where the fidelity is better.
It's not the regulars at NIH. If anything they are pulling more unofficial overtime than ever before to try to compensate for what is coming from on top and what DOGE destroyed
1st, K-awards are specially meant to provide a funding path to support an early career scientist to continue in the field. Expecting that another team has already replicated the early work of a young scientist is not realistic. They are just starting out.
2nd. If you want replication, you got to fund replication. Researcher money doesn't appear out of nowhere, so make the decision, increase the science budget with a new replication budget.
3rd. Yes there is some fraud. Always has been. Is it more than before? Maybe? But unless you count paper mill journals that no serious scientist reads, it is much smaller than pop media makes it out to be.
Why should the fruits of our labor be taken to pay for some rando’s job training? If they actually had any potential, they wouldn’t need job training and certainly wouldn’t need average people to pay for it.
I’ll think of the poor researchers once we get the homeless in my hometown of Pittsburgh down to zero. Currently, real people matter more to me.
Why? Oh researchers aren't real people? They are some elite group or something? Not people that work their assess off? Not people like me who went from growing up in a rural impoverished neighborhood of dirt and chicken-coops to become a scientists as a first generation college student, much less a professor?
Why? Because we can make more in the private industry, but choose not to. That is why the K exists. Our pay is much less than we can get elsewhere, but we choose to stay for our mission. We leave when forced to by economics. The whole nation loses when basic and clinical science falters. Every major advance, the very fact that we are writing messages back and forth, comes down to basic science that we layed the ground work for, but hey, fuck us, right? We aren't real people. Just elite fucks stealing from real people, I guess. Huh.
The fruits of your labor.
You, along with everyone else, use the fruits of *OUR* labor. Every fucking time you go to the doctor, get an MRI, fuel up your truck, plug in your computer, connect to wifi, use drugs to keep your dick hard, you are demonstrating that scientists helped build this country and this world, every bit as much as the guys digging ditches, building bridges, and picking fruit and cotton (all three of which my grandparents did in spades).
"some rando’s job training? If they actually had any potential, they wouldn’t need job training"... --your ignorance is startling. The people getting these k awards are the best of the best. You cannot get a R01 grant as a post-doc. You cannot even apply. The K is there to find the best post-docs, and give them funding that they can use as a post-doc, and carry over into their first real position. Moreover, that it is "job training" is just an intentional misnomer that has suppressed our wages for decades. Decades ago, a post-doc was the exception, not the rule. It was for scientists who could not find a position yet, or needed a few more months. The expectation was that an undergraduate (4 years) then a 6-7 years of graduate school was usually enough "training". But the desire for cheap labor and the successful production of trained scientists, and consistently lower than inflation growth in research funding created a situation where many of the best scientists were still spending 4-6 years in a post-doc position...a supposed training position, and one that still payed like it.
For example, a relation of mine finished his undergraduate, last year, and is already earning more than I am after 6 years of graduate school, 6 years as a postdoc, and two years as a professor at a top-notch research institution. From an economic decision, I was a stupid fuck. I like what I do, love it in fact, but the system abused me for it. Some fucking elite. Not a real person.
You are free to have the dumb as fuck position that we should not publicly fund science. You are also free to be ignorant as fuck about the real condition of working scientists, but I am also free as fuck to tell you that you are wrong.
I don't even blame you. Scientists are the favorite target of those who want to manipulate others through propaganda. If you respect scientists, not implicitly trust, but believe that most are serious and relatively trustworthy to tell you the truth as far as they can honestly discern, then propagandists can be ignored. So we get attacked and abused. Knock us down so that their talking heads can be the only arbiter of truth.
Finally, I agree, wholeheartedly that there is a lot of poverty and homelessness. I grew up in it. being it. But scientists are the wrong target for your ire. Funding research is a huge return on investment [1]. We can make improvements in how it is conducted, sure, but we shouldn't be the target of your ire. We create jobs. We create wealth. And then others make money off the fruit of our labor. Gobs of it. And we are actually trying to solve problems like homelessness to find interventions for drug abuse and mental health.
So what ever. I get your pain, but reject what you say with every particle of my being.
My job depends on NIH continuing to function, but it is not immediately clear that this particular decision follows other worrying trends discussed here previously. Removing K-awards for clinical trials (but not regular, cheaper study formats) might simply be a recognition that clinical trials are too expensive for the K-format and conducting underpowered clinical trials does not help anyone much.
AI is an existential threat, full stop. It can also help us solve many of our greatest problems. Let's not let it solve those problems by removing us as the quickest shortcut.
I'm a wildly pro-AI dude, but the idea that this is an existential threat makes me think one thing: "you consume too much dystopian content."
A lot of things could be an existential threat, nuclear weapons, bio-weapons, climate change, the end of the Flynn effect, cratering birth rates, whatever.
You can always pick out a particularly dystopian vision of the future if you're so inclined. The doom narrative is sells ad revenue, so it's a huge amount of what we all consume online, but it's not really that mapped out to reality...
Somethings get worse, some things get better, in general, the average QoL for the average human is getting better. If we decide not to go to global thermonuclear war, or we decide to unplug any killer AIs that we invent, we'll probably be ok. If we can reduce the population to 3,000-ish humans after the Toba eruption, we can probably survive whatever self-imposed calamities we can create.
I think there's something particularly noxious about the present nihilism trend I see in a lot of this doom themed content. People should go outside and touch grass.
A lot of things being potential existential threats doesn't make them equally threatening.
Things like climate change, psychometric test levels and birth rates change slowly and give us time to react, things like nuclear weapons are accessible to only a select number of actors, AI enabled bioweapons is neither of those.
I mean, that wouldn't be great, but yeah, we've "made it through before" I bet we could do it again. I'm hoping we don't, but with 8.3-10b of us, I doubt we'll have that low of a population ever again.
I don't even think it's likely to be catastrophic at all.
Edit to add:
Everyone is pulling these random P(doom) numbers out of their asses. This is likely going to be amazing for everyone, we'll cure basically every disease, fix the environment, and go travel to space if we can get out of our own way enough to do it. I cannot believe the consistent negativity I see about this.
But it's never "good outcomes aren't guaranteed" it's always "DOOOOOOOM!!!" and other cynical bs. Things aren't as dire as people are making it out to be. This reminds me of Malthusianism that never panned out because low and behold we figured out ways to solve the DOOOOOM problem before it became catastrophic.
I see pro-war people using AI, but AI being intrinsically pro-war? I beg to differ, if anything, most of the models coming out of the frontier labs seem pretty aligned with anti-war stances. Of course that can change, but yeah.
And "decide" is exactly right. We can decide to not do bad things. You have agency. Stop reading propaganda that is meant to break your spirit and go for a walk, seriously.
If we could, it would be wise to prevent the sun from enveloping the earth at some point before that happened, yes.
(obviously "we" won't be around or whatever, but the point remains: yes, you should solve as many existential threats as you can before they're realized)
> "I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world." -- Ronald Reagan at the United Nations [0]
We are going to be fine as long as we remember to be nice to each other, starting towards the people who are adjacent to us.
Having recently read both of Annie Jacobsen’s books — _Nuclear War_ and _Biological War_ — I’m much more concerned about a bioweapon than a nuclear one.
Her conclusion to the latter book comes out and says it, paraphrasing here:
> Nuclear war is terrifying in its destruction, but the chain of command limits the risk of a rogue actor. Whereas bio weapons can be designed and manufactured in relatively low tech environments with equal or greater magnitudes of impact.
Not sure how much Annie Jacobsen goes into the exact dynamics in Nuclear War, but it may be worth reading Ellsbergs' Doomsday Machine before you find comfort in the "chain of command."
People keep mixing up the fact that it's very hard for a virus to naturally evolve that's both extremely lethal and extremely contagious with the totally distinct claim that it's hard or impossible to create a virus that's both extremely lethal and extremely contagious.
The former is true for obvious reasons. The latter claim is not true at all. Nothing prevents the existence of a virus that's both of those things.
If HIV had been or become an airborne virus when it entered the human population in the early 1900s, there's a pretty good chance it would have been an extinction event for the human race. I suppose there might have been a few isolated pockets of humans left in 2026, but I would not personally ever use the words "good news" to describe an outcome that reduces the human population to a few thousand people.
Nukes also cannot kill everyone. Nuclear winter was proven to not be based on solid evidence, the earth remains very habitable after all nukes have gone off.
Show me that proof please. So far the counter evidence has not been convincing. FWIW I don’t think nuclear war will annihilate us. But it won’t be pleasant.
Actually, I've seen the take that the previous poster has made too. The wikipedia page is pretty good IMO. Proof of a hypothetical future event is pretty hard to get, but here's the wiki rabbit hole (if you're anything like me you'll find this fascinating and spend the next couple hours clicking links - you're welcome!).
Annie Jacobsen is awesome, her book about Area 51 was riveting, but I also cannot unsee "Capitalist Realism" and the idea that we keep picturing civilization-ending catastrophes because we don't want to go to work in the morning, and walking/biking everywhere and living in a small community is amazingly appealing to us at a base level. We yearn for the lifestyle of the apocalypse survivor, but none of us want to go through the apocalypse. Generally, I think we kind of say, "oh, it'll be the end of the world" because most of us (myself included) lack the imagination to really look beyond linear extrapolations of the status quo most of the time.
This is what I'm saying constantly to people, I recognize it makes me fantastically obnoxious, but also, I'm gesturing wildly to the things that are happening and yelling, "THINGS DON'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY."
Then again, I'm also building my cabin in the woods.
How I use claude in my grant writing.
I write a rough paragraph. I invoke /concise-mode skill (a supposed instruction that Claude used for their previous concise writing style), and ask it to revise for clarity. I re-read to ensure it says what I wanted, ask for another revision with a specific request, or manually edit.
This is a productivity enhancement for me. I am not writing art. I am delivering information for my research plan. While I would not mind a flag that indicated AI assisted for clarity, I do not want to be accused of using AI-wholesale. I put a lot of work into it, and I do not want to be maligned.
