7 ms·

A quick Google search will show you... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/26/national-science-foundation-doge-cuts/83282784007/ https://www.us

by jryan49 22d ago

A quick Google search will show you... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/26/national-science-foundation-doge-cuts/83282784007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/26/nati... You're just willfully ignorant

WalterBright 22d ago
Asking for evidence is not "willfully ignorant". People making claims have the onus of backing them up. Anyhow, the link to the canceled projects is: https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jntvk=allRecords&jntvk%3Aview=plaeS6fTnZvbmtQRS&jntvk%3Asort=eyJwZWw4ZlRSME8ycmFObWNUYyI6W119&jntvk%3Agroup=eyJwZWw4ZlRSME8ycmFObWNUYyI6W119 https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt... I looked at maybe a dozen at random, and only one seemed to have anything about scientific research. Of course, that is not a complete survey, but none of them looked important. I'm sure there are a few that are important. Which one(s) do you think are most important?
- nrr 22d ago
  I might be biased, but everything under the Division of Mathematical Sciences in the MPS directorate is important. Math is one of those weird fields that tends to touch everything else even if not directly, and it's impossible to know prima facie which areas of research will be useful downstream to the sciences and engineering.
  - WalterBright 22d ago
    I can go for that, as long as the research proposals are actually about math research.
    - nrr 22d ago
      The stuff in Airtable seems to be. The lion's share of what's there is research that has applications to, like, sensors and robotics and AI, even if the abstracts themselves don't state that, likely because the PIs behind those proposals aren't aware of those applications of their work. (Just to illustrate how mathematicians can sometimes embody the archetype of Hans Guck-in-die-Luft: I had someone tell me once that there were no applications of ODEs or PDEs to the sciences or engineering.)
      - WalterBright 22d ago
        > Hans Guck-in-die-Luft I have to upvote you just for that reference! My mom tore out Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher, thinking it would be disturbing to my young mind.
  - remarkEon 22d ago
    Most of the important maths research is funded by the Department of War. NSF is a good chunk, I'd have to look it up, but I wouldn't be concerned about this at all. Math is important for the war planners, always has been always will be.
    - nrr 22d ago
      Thanks for sharing. I don't work on weapons as a matter of deep conviction, so I'll continue to be concerned about this.
      - remarkEon 22d ago
        My point is math is a weapon.
        nrr 21d ago
        Forgive me, but I don't exactly follow. This isn't obvious to me.
        remarkEon 21d ago
        No worries. Sufficient encryption, or encryption breaking, technology trends toward behavior as a weapon. As such, the military is highly, highly interested in mathematics generally, and cryptography specifically. There's a ton of really fun and riveting history there, if you're interested. For a long time, "encryption" to a certain degree was export controlled, but that's not really how it works today. The point is, you cannot have effective cyberweapons without extremely sophisticated ... math.
        nrr 21d ago
        Oh, I mean, I'm fully aware of the emphasis on codebreaking and on areas like operations research that provide optimization tools for tacticians, not to mention the ITAR restrictions on crypto export. (I was there when only 40-bit SSL was unrestricted! I very much remember those days! They sucked!) I guess the hangup I have is that my forays into areas like differential geometry and algebraic topology are extremely abstract, and I cannot control anyone who isn't me who misuses those tools in decidedly not-sober ways. I can only make sure that I don't have a direct hand in that kind of misuse.
- keeda 22d ago
  Are we looking at the same link? I scrolled through a bunch of them and I could not find a single one that was NOT related to scientific research. The UI is horrible so I can't link anything on that page, but here's what I see when I click that link: https://i.imgur.com/LzwDuKl.png https://i.imgur.com/LzwDuKl.png (Edited to add, these are the abstracts, because I can't fit both in one screen /facepalm: https://i.imgur.com/yQKHViO.png https://i.imgur.com/yQKHViO.png) Maybe there's a different filter or ordering being applied somewhere?
  - WalterBright 22d ago
    Maybe you and I have different views on what constitutes scientific research.
    - keeda 22d ago
      Here is the list of projects I see (warning, text OCR'd from the screenshot) -- how many of these would you say are NOT scientific research? Collaborative Research: Bounding global ice volumes over the last glacial cycle using reconstructions of Bering Strait flooding Collaborative Research: Effects of government-insured mortgages Basic Plasma Science Facility Renewal Studies in the Climate Dynamics of Moist Process Variability and Change NeTS: Medium: Provable Guarantees for Network Protocol Implementations Collaborative Research: Ideas Lab: RNA-encoded Molecular Memory (REMM) Research: Process and consequences of social partner choice revealed by multilayer network analysis Collaborative Research: Towards the Foundation of Approximate Sampling-Based Exploration in Sequential Decision Making Travel Grant: International School/Symposium for Space Simulations (ISSS) and Interrelationship between Plasma Experiments in the Laboratory and in Space (IPELS) RAPID: Measuring Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) Composition During and After the Los Angeles Wildland-Urban Interface Fires GEM: Fundamental Properties of Dawnside Auroral Polarization Streams and Their Role in Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Instabilities and Dramatic Events PFI-TT: A Rapid Multiplexed Diagnostic Tool for Serology of Tick-Borne Diseases

by jryan49 22d ago

WalterBright 22d ago

Asking for evidence is not "willfully ignorant". People making claims have the onus of backing them up. Anyhow, the link to the canceled projects is: https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jntvk=allRecords&jntvk%3Aview=plaeS6fTnZvbmtQRS&jntvk%3Asort=eyJwZWw4ZlRSME8ycmFObWNUYyI6W119&jntvk%3Agroup=eyJwZWw4ZlRSME8ycmFObWNUYyI6W119 https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt... I looked at maybe a dozen at random, and only one seemed to have anything about scientific research. Of course, that is not a complete survey, but none of them looked important. I'm sure there are a few that are important. Which one(s) do you think are most important?

nrr 22d ago
I might be biased, but everything under the Division of Mathematical Sciences in the MPS directorate is important. Math is one of those weird fields that tends to touch everything else even if not directly, and it's impossible to know prima facie which areas of research will be useful downstream to the sciences and engineering.
- WalterBright 22d ago
  I can go for that, as long as the research proposals are actually about math research.
  - nrr 22d ago
    The stuff in Airtable seems to be. The lion's share of what's there is research that has applications to, like, sensors and robotics and AI, even if the abstracts themselves don't state that, likely because the PIs behind those proposals aren't aware of those applications of their work. (Just to illustrate how mathematicians can sometimes embody the archetype of Hans Guck-in-die-Luft: I had someone tell me once that there were no applications of ODEs or PDEs to the sciences or engineering.)
    - WalterBright 22d ago
      > Hans Guck-in-die-Luft I have to upvote you just for that reference! My mom tore out Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher, thinking it would be disturbing to my young mind.
- remarkEon 22d ago
  Most of the important maths research is funded by the Department of War. NSF is a good chunk, I'd have to look it up, but I wouldn't be concerned about this at all. Math is important for the war planners, always has been always will be.
  - nrr 22d ago
    Thanks for sharing. I don't work on weapons as a matter of deep conviction, so I'll continue to be concerned about this.
    - remarkEon 22d ago
      My point is math is a weapon.
      - nrr 21d ago
        Forgive me, but I don't exactly follow. This isn't obvious to me.
        remarkEon 21d ago
        No worries. Sufficient encryption, or encryption breaking, technology trends toward behavior as a weapon. As such, the military is highly, highly interested in mathematics generally, and cryptography specifically. There's a ton of really fun and riveting history there, if you're interested. For a long time, "encryption" to a certain degree was export controlled, but that's not really how it works today. The point is, you cannot have effective cyberweapons without extremely sophisticated ... math.
        nrr 21d ago
        Oh, I mean, I'm fully aware of the emphasis on codebreaking and on areas like operations research that provide optimization tools for tacticians, not to mention the ITAR restrictions on crypto export. (I was there when only 40-bit SSL was unrestricted! I very much remember those days! They sucked!) I guess the hangup I have is that my forays into areas like differential geometry and algebraic topology are extremely abstract, and I cannot control anyone who isn't me who misuses those tools in decidedly not-sober ways. I can only make sure that I don't have a direct hand in that kind of misuse.
keeda 22d ago
Are we looking at the same link? I scrolled through a bunch of them and I could not find a single one that was NOT related to scientific research. The UI is horrible so I can't link anything on that page, but here's what I see when I click that link: https://i.imgur.com/LzwDuKl.png https://i.imgur.com/LzwDuKl.png (Edited to add, these are the abstracts, because I can't fit both in one screen /facepalm: https://i.imgur.com/yQKHViO.png https://i.imgur.com/yQKHViO.png) Maybe there's a different filter or ordering being applied somewhere?
- WalterBright 22d ago
  Maybe you and I have different views on what constitutes scientific research.
  - keeda 22d ago
    Here is the list of projects I see (warning, text OCR'd from the screenshot) -- how many of these would you say are NOT scientific research? Collaborative Research: Bounding global ice volumes over the last glacial cycle using reconstructions of Bering Strait flooding Collaborative Research: Effects of government-insured mortgages Basic Plasma Science Facility Renewal Studies in the Climate Dynamics of Moist Process Variability and Change NeTS: Medium: Provable Guarantees for Network Protocol Implementations Collaborative Research: Ideas Lab: RNA-encoded Molecular Memory (REMM) Research: Process and consequences of social partner choice revealed by multilayer network analysis Collaborative Research: Towards the Foundation of Approximate Sampling-Based Exploration in Sequential Decision Making Travel Grant: International School/Symposium for Space Simulations (ISSS) and Interrelationship between Plasma Experiments in the Laboratory and in Space (IPELS) RAPID: Measuring Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) Composition During and After the Los Angeles Wildland-Urban Interface Fires GEM: Fundamental Properties of Dawnside Auroral Polarization Streams and Their Role in Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Instabilities and Dramatic Events PFI-TT: A Rapid Multiplexed Diagnostic Tool for Serology of Tick-Borne Diseases