- Playground by Richard Powers: the ocean reminds us that we, along with our obsessions and rivalries, are small
- Orbital by Samantha Harvey: a book were not much happens, but a lot goes on below the surface
- Hum by Helen Phillips: looks at an AI controlled near future through a different lens
- Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow: sex, lies, and video games
It's very plausible that anxiety causes heart disease, anxiety causes insomnia, and insomnia leads people to use melatonin. Same with diphenhydramine, overactive inflammatory response causes allergies, allergic people take allergy meds, and too much inflammation contributes to dementia.
Association studies too easily get interpreted as X causes Y. Maybe that's true, but not necessarily.
It's also highly discriminatory and ideological. Decades of discrimination will lead people to want to come back and tear it down, you reap what you sow.
Could you explain more about the "highly discriminatory and ideological" behavior you've seen? Is it across the board, in the sciences? For example, is a neurosurgery lab at UC Davis working on glioma research either discriminatory and ideologically driven?
I can speak to one instance of this (which was before COVID and the events surrounding George Floyd, so apply context as needed), but I took a class on networking implementations in low-budget and rural regions.
As part of the curriculum, there were distinct lessons (in this hard-science course) on feminist design, avoiding white-savior rollouts, and cultural relativism -- with much room to expound on their importance, and little room to critique.
I happened to agree with lots of the mindsets of these lessons a priori, but I was definitely acutely aware the whole course that there was an ideological bent, even in STEM.
The networking stack obviously had no viewpoint, but the course teaching it certainly did.
I don't know if networking implementations in low-budget and rural regions is a purely STEM topic. The mere fact it talks about low-budget and rural regions suggests to me it interacts with geography and sociology and development economics, which to me makes sense that it'd incorporate ideas from those fields as well.
This is one of the core problems that many on the "left" will not understand.
The problem is that the people who have seen and who have experienced this will never tell you. I and many like me I've talked to will simply never tell their actual beliefs to a colleague who believes like this.
Cannot tell you how many countless meetings I've been in where I have a differing opinion and say nothing because of backlash and loss of softpower.
The truth is that there are huge numbers of your coworkers, bosses, and employees who have different thoughts that don't align with the current ideology. These people have learned to say nothing. I myself being one of them.
I have on multiple occasions just straight lied to a liberal coworker about my beliefs because me telling what I actually think would make it very difficult to work with them.
The fuck are you taking about? They can’t even fill the seats with the demographic bomb hitting. Dude, populations change. Therefore they have demand and supply they meet. I don’t care for the system for other reasons but discriminatory? Get fucking real.
US scientific research funding is largely driven by nepotism and favoritism. Insiders know but don't talk too much about it. They have a few options: a) just quietly stay in the system trying their best to do good work b) join the gravy train through social climbing c) quietly leave and move on with their careers.
This is pretty vague and gestural, I'd love specific examples to support your accusation. I work on NIH funded grants, and while I don't write the grants, I'm reasonably familiar with the process. I disagree with your assessment when it comes to any grant I've been involved with. I've never seen corruption like that. These grant proposals look a lot like private sector bids: here's what we want to do, and how it aligns with your mission, and here's how we plan to do it, and how much we're asking for. The process is competitive, and a committee decides on the outcome. Everything has oversight, and is very procedural. Before working on NIH grants, I worked in the private sector doing large contracts for 13 years, and the downside of the way the NIH does it is not corruption, if anything it's bureaucratic slowness and overcaution. The private sector was much shadier and prone to cronyism, and has nothing to teach the government on that count... believe it or not.
I used to work in academia and was involved in NSF and DOE grants. I’ve been in industry (IC then manager) since then.
My sense is that grant funding was less merit based than industry funding. I’m not saying it’s so corrupt that it should be completely torn down, but there’s just less accountability in academia - you can get a grant, fail to deliver on what you promised, and still get another grant after that and that can be your whole career if you know how to play the academic social game and are good at writing proposals.
The whole point of many of these grants is to invest in research on the leading edge where, by definition, nobody knows whether what they're trying to do is going to work, because it's actually new.
Of course that can be gamed, and of course we need good faith oversight, but if none of the research projects we're funding were to ever fail, that would be evidence that we're being massively too conservative in the avenues for new discoveries that we're investing in exploring.
If that's true, and you've offered no evidence to support that it is, canceling funding for anything tangentially associated with "DEI" doesn't seem like it actually solves any of those problems.
Please name a specific government grant that was given to a specific researcher based nepotism and favoritism.
The last time I checked when I worked at a Stanford biomedical university department that was substantially NIH-funded, there were 2 full time employee grant writers who had to supply the government grant process with a laundry list of specific data with each carefully-worded proposal because they were regularly competing with other universities to win a specific grant.
Some Stanford guy caused the NIH to deprioritize the infectious etiology theory for Alzheimer’s for decades. It’s not clear why his research was considered better than the others’, but it did receive a lot of attention and became the driving force. Millions have paid the price. His voice was not the only one, it was just the favored one.
Insiders have little say. NSF is probably the most merit based system in all the US government. Literally any other program (defense?) is less merit based.
Also, if nepotism and favoritism are the criteria for removal, let's start with the Executive branch.
Even taking this as true, and also taking it as true that we need to build a new research funding system from a clean slate to fix it - that can still be done in parallel while leaving the existing system in place! So as usual the effort of trying to discern some higher purposes is unwarranted, and the goal of these people is to just straight up destroy our country.
Yeah, sounds like the problems are more due to monorepos rather than with GitHub actions. Seems like the pendulum always swings too far. Overdoing microservices results in redundant code and interservice spaghetti. Monorepos have their own set of issues. The only solution is to think carefully about a what size chunk of functionality you want to build, test, and deploy as a unit.
I found it quite worthwhile to ask GPT4o to give an english summary of the paper linked in the Wikipedia article, _Bekräftartekniker och motstrategier - sätt att bemöta maktstrukturer och förändra sociala klimat_, which translates to _Techniques of Suppression and Counterstrategies: Addressing Power Structures and Changing Social Climates_.
Recognizing and pushing back against the dark patterns of group dynamics is super important.
Programming was mostly a hobby in the days of 8-bit PCs. It was a profession for some decades. Maybe it will be a hobby again in 5 years. Like gardening, sailing, fishing - professions at one time, now hobbies.
On the other hand, the arrival of futuristic capabilities like computers speaking human languages is what drew me to technology in the first place. Luckily, you can choose to look forward and backward. You don't have to pick only one.
- Playground by Richard Powers: the ocean reminds us that we, along with our obsessions and rivalries, are small - Orbital by Samantha Harvey: a book were not much happens, but a lot goes on below the surface - Hum by Helen Phillips: looks at an AI controlled near future through a different lens - Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow: sex, lies, and video games