Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

None of this is necessary, that's the point.

>Officials have also ordered a communications pause, a freeze on hiring, and an indefinite ban on travel.

I thought trump was bringing American jobs back? So far he's impacted thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of jobs in 2 days, and hasn't even made a plan for how to get americans hired.

(yes, a miniscule piece of me is enjoying how fast the Schedenfreude came. But still, I do mostly want to focus on fixing the country over pointing fingers).

people who voted for trump is not going to change their mind based on evidence. They're essentially voting on faith, it's almost like a religion.

I guess there's hope for the tens of thousands that decided to sit out this time too.

If that is the case, is there any way back from Trumpism to the "normal" Republican party from the era of Bush?

Short of civil war, nuclear war, or a twenty-point election blow-out, no.

Trump just pardoned the core of an army of thugs that will be legally allowed to stow election chaos in every swing district in the country.

Watch. In the mid-terms there will be violence. Then possibly martial law. Then the end of our constitution.

Then Trump will have us all spying on each other to see who's loyal and people will just get murdered without consequence.

He will do everything in his power to become a dictator.

And with the immunity decision he doesn't even have to worry about going to jail for it. I hope we are wrong. I hope people come out of the woodwork to tell that fool where to shove it. But I am afraid the tech oligarchy + right wing media has such a hold on information sources for a majority that half the country won't even know what's happening.

The one thing we know is that voters are transactional.

Eggs, Chicken, Beef, and Rent will either stay horrible or get worse and with so many Federal jobs being wiped out, unemployment will go up.

They needed to get past the mid-terms to do the most damage, but they are not heading in that direction.

And if he tries to use the military on U.S. citizens, we should expect a serious push back. Our military is drilled with "all enemies foreign and domestic".

There are a number of paths forward wherein voting won't matter.

Here's a simple, and bloodless one - when you lose, do the same thing that happened in 2020 - come up with a billion different lies - that you know are lies - about how the election was fraudulent - except this time, Congress and the VP will actually fail to certify the results, it'll go to SCOTUS, which will decide 6-3.

There are also bloodier alternatives.

The system only works when everyone believes that it works, and that they'll be punished for defecting. It's just been made very clear that there will be no punishments for treason.

Trump just mandated a legally binding and fundamental shift from equity-based hiring (eg: affirmative action, DEI, et al.) back to merit-based.

This by its very nature necessitates a temporary freeze on all human resources activites pending reviews to see if any as they currently stand violate equal opportunity guarantees and other requirements based on objective factors.

Personally, and I say this as a minority (Japanese-American male), I 300% approve of all this. People must be hired based on their character and capability, not because they happened to be born with the right skin color or sexual organs.

The war against DEI is clearly over so not that it matters anymore but I have to push back every time I see this sort of comment. DEI, as it relates to hiring, does not and has never meant that people are hired because of their sex or skin color. What it means in practice is that organizations cast a wider net in the search for, and I can't stress this enough, qualified applicants. This wider net has proven to bring forth better candidates to organizations. Also, casting a wider net opens the door for people who are white/asian but come from less traditional backgrounds and/or less prestigious schools to apply as well. Please read up on what DEI truly is before applauding its demise. As scientist, engineers, programmers, and technologists (I assume you are one of those if you are in this forum) we can't blindly believe the propaganda of either side of the political spectrum. In this case, a coordinated effort has deliberately mischaracterized DEI and merit-based hiring as opposites. They are not opposites.

>qualified applicants.

The problem is what "qualified" means under Affirmative Action, DEI, et al..

As a Japanese-American, I've both first- and second-hand witnessed racism against Asians (and Whites) in favor of Blacks and Hispanics in the name of Affirmative Action. That is racism and discrimination in both ways and there have been court rulings prohibiting Affirmative Action, I in absolute terms cannot in good faith accept Affirmative Action.

The "D" in DEI stands for "Diversity", which in the majority of cases meant hiring people with stronger weighting placed on their race or nationality and sex. This again is very literally racism, sexism, and discrimination and completely unacceptable.

The "E" in DEI stands for "Equity", which in clearer terms means Equal Conclusions, not Equal Opportunities as indirectly declared in our Declaration of Independence (all men created equal with an unalienable right to pursuit of happiness). This is an affront to one of the very cornerstones of our country and the American Dream, which is completely unacceptable.

Lastly the "I" in DEI stands for "Inclusion", which would be fine were it not for the fact that the actual implementation has involved excluding peoples who do not subscribe to certain narratives. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in politics and specifically identity politics, where the Center and Right simply call me an American but the Left call me various labels. I very sincerely don't have time for that divisive bullshit.

As someone who loves and appreciates science and technology and all the wonders we can accomplish, I reiterate my 300% support for the absolute rescinding of equity-based hiring and other equity-based human resources programmes. As Martin Luther King once said, I too dream of a day when everyone will be judged by the quality of their character. I dream of a day when everyone will be judged by what they are capable of, not what they are born as.

You experienced racism and are calling it DEI

DEI and other such affirmative action concepts are racism.

The idea that I can't show preference for one thing with out showing prejudice from another is a farce

The sheer amount of regression against social liberalism over the last few decades truly is astonishing; you're literally trying to tell me that racism is equality and okay.

I hope we're on the cusp of reversing course on all that so we can make MLK's dream a reality again.

>you're literally trying to tell me that racism is equality and okay.

Where did I say that?

its a race based caste quota system in reality with a priesthood that accidentally spread racism. It produces the same results reliably as real world socialism. No need to read up on idealistic texts which produce the same outcome with the given real humans.

I too have to push back, because I have been the victim of these laws and profiling, and I'm not an "ignorant" person falling for propaganda as you seem to imply is the only way for anti-DEI sentiments to occur.

DEI is ideology and hidden threats of retaliation under the guise of "equality". And because nothing can be explicit, or it's all hidden under feel-good language (exactly the kind you used in your post). It adds a layer of redirection about what's really going on, and it all gets put forth with everyone having the understanding (because of examples) that if they don't find "diverse enough qualified" candidates, then they are racist and will be punished.

Meanwhile, the language provides cover for blatant anti-white, anti-asian and anti-male discrimination:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/06/tech-industry-2020-anti-raci...

They even have specialized software that uses AI to determine race (profiling?): https://www.piratewires.com/p/gem-hr-software-dei

Or what about ESG that has a racial-quota point system that allows investors and people to discriminate against companies that don't conform? https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/10/30/racial-equity-aud...

This kind of stuff is just the tip of the iceberg, there is more: https://www.bloomberg.com/company/press/bloomberg-2023-gei/

What about the fact that several countries (Western) have explicit gender-based quotas enacted as law. E.g. Norway, Germany, France, India, and others.

Or what about countries that have actual race-based points systems to discriminate against minority (white) groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Economic_Empowerment And no, just because it's some obscure and obfuscated "points system" doesn't mean it isn't racial discrimination, profiling and retaliation against companies that don't conform.

How some places in the US have race-quotas for boards: https://pacificlegal.org/discriminatory-mandates-prevent-qua...

And there are so many more, it's right infront of our eyes:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/red-state-sues-tec...

So why don't we drop the pretense, ordinary people see what's really going on, and no amount of sugar-coating and "feel good" words will make the very real discrimination go away, and they won't be gaslight and have their concerns waved away because of "falling for right wing propaganda" and "please read up on what DEI truly is".

As someone with a fair amount of experience on hiring review boards in the public sector (local and federal), I felt what many of these programs/approaches did was ensure that minorities were given a better opportunity to be evaluated based on their merits. My expectation now is that if someone is a minority they're going to have a much harder time getting a shot to demonstrate that character and capability at all, maybe not though, time will tell.

Perhaps for some it's viewed as a positive if these groups are underrepresented in terms of percentage of federal employees as long as their roles are filled by someone perceived to be more capable with stronger character (weird how frequently that's a white guy these days).

Except of course what you will now get is jobs preferentially for those who are white, male Trump loyalists. You're 300% delusional when you think there's any chance that from now on "character and capability" will be the relevant hiring metrics. Just have a look at the assortment of clowns, creeps, conmen and criminals that is Trump's cabinet.

It is a exercise of power for the sake of power. The pointlessness of it is the point.

The point is to create chaos and panic so that , after a sufficient period of general suffering, the government can come back with a "solution to the problem" which is typically some vastly inferior approach with heavy privatization and corruption built in, but as the stakeholders are desperate for relief they have no choice but to accept.

This is how you tear the government down and replace it with corrupt oligarchic interests

Now let's go break some windows!

Joke's on them, they're just going to hasten a revolution.

That's why they're partnering with Oracle and AI companies to build datacenters to pull in and automatically analyze all available private and public video feeds and communications to monitor for potential violent action. China got there first, the US will rapidly roll out the same playbook but painted with liberal terminology. It's not about harmony here, it's about freedom and protecting ourselves from terrorists and the radical left.

> That's why they're partnering with Oracle and AI companies to build datacenters to pull in and automatically analyze all available private and public video feeds and communications to monitor for potential violent action.

Larry Ellison said it on record if anyone doubts it. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on."[1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...

I feel like his yacht shouldn't be that hard to track...

What a dystopian hellscape we are approaching.

The oligarchs are playing a losing game in the long term, they'll always have to rely on people to help them, and it's too easy to kill someone if you're willing to sacrifice your life to do it.

I hear Mario Party has been pretty popular recently.

Except that this is the kind of governance that American voters chose. They can't claim to have been misled. They explicitly voted for oligarchy and this is what they asked for.

If you're waiting for American voters to wake up and demand good governance you'll be waiting a really long time.

I don't expect voters to wake up, I do expect the assassins of the rich and powerful to become folk heroes along with riots and vandalism of corporate property, and when the government tries to crack down on it, against the government as well.

Shocktheraphy as seen in Iraq

The scientific establishment has had 2 major crises recently - the replication crisis, and the totally insane unscientific and politicized handling of COVID.

Additionally there is undeniably a lot of waste, nepotism / back scratching, and completely ludicrous funded social “science”.

While what’s happening now may wind up bad, I have seen very little push from the establishment itself to do anything to restore public faith in the current system. Trump is the executioner, but the conviction was handed down before he came around.

@dang why is this flagged?

Here speaks someone with no scientific training or knowledge of the NIH, public health, or how any of it operates.

The replication crisis stuff is mostly a message board fixation. The problem we have is that people unfamiliar with the field don't have a sense of what the denominator is, only the numerator. There is a truly gargantuan amount of NIH-funded research happening; NIH funds over 30,000 PIs per year, and those grants cover years worth of research, most of which involve teams of 5-10 people.

I'm not saying research fraud doesn't matter or isn't worth the stories written about it. I'm saying that people commenting on it generally don't have any sense of its scale, and fill in some very weird blanks about it.

I think something like a very public, televised shaming of researchers found to be fraudulent. Furthermore far, far more done to catch fraud before it is published, like bounties paid out, and instant career destruction to the fraudsters.

There was decades of “but everyone is doing it!” in the system, so much so that fraudsters became presidents of Ivy League institutions. The reckoning has not come.

This is what I mean by how messageboardy this issue is.

What is your solution to prevent continued fraud and abuse in our research process, other than random people going through published papers?

The optimal amount of fraud in any large system is almost never "zero".

Yes I will stick by my opinion we should have scientific fraudsters go on a televised panel to be shamed publicly and mercilessly

Sounds awesome, maybe MrBeast can host.

MrBeast has important things to do.

I hope the deep irony of someone whose named after and advertises a cryptocoin talking about fraudsters being shamed publicly on televised panels isn't lost on you.

Sure. As long as all the other fraudsters and science deniers that were just elected or waiting to be appointed go too

Maoist struggle sessions, now with shitcoins!

Have you read this post about p-value suspiciousness as a means of testing for widespread non-replicable results? https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/ranking-fields-by-p-value-suspici...

And that's not to speak of things like biotech which is full of photoshopped images of fluorescence and whatnot.

I've been on a messageboard for more than a couple years, I am familiar with the concept of p-hacking, and it has nothing to do with what I just wrote.

The claim in the post is that the replication crisis is real. Of course, it's among those you consider messageboard folk so you can dismiss it on those grounds, but I think you are wrong to say it has nothing to do with what you wrote since it attempts to deal with both the numerator and the denominator by taking a sample across fields.

I don't know what point you're trying to make here. Is it that there are fraudulent research papers in journals? Everybody knows that's true. Is it that there are tens of thousands of them produced every year? That's made up.

People are counting on readers not to know or take the time to learn how much research is happening, so that individual instances of the problem (in the United States) seem systemic.

The post makes the point that a large amount of science produced in the US is not trustworthy. Fraudulence implies intentional deception, but it is more likely that it is simply a response to incentives. I don't see why you can't understand what I'm saying, but in the hope that it's easier I'll put it in bullet points and try to be direct

* The post is a sample of papers across many fields

* It describes a method to determine whether widespread p-hacking is occurring in a field

* Widespread p-hacking in a field will lead to unreproducible results (because the results are an artifact of the data rather than reflecting any underlying cause)

* You said: The replication crisis stuff is mostly a message board fixation. The problem we have is that people unfamiliar with the field don't have a sense of what the denominator is, only the numerator.

* The approach in the post uses a statistical method across many papers across many fields. It does not rely on the existence of some number of non-replicable results (in fact, one should expect some percentage of results to be non-replicable).

* Therefore, it doesn't rely on "the numerator" so to speak, but a sample of all papers in a field to characterize the field's replicability.

You're a smart guy. I follow your posts here and on Twitter. So I can only assume that either I've flipped some bozo bit or something in my communication style is abstruse. I don't understand why you're saying that p-hacking has nothing to do with the replication crisis (most would expect the two to be quite related), or that saying "the replication crisis is real" means I am claiming that individual papers exist that are non-replicable (which is fine, but not a replication crisis). In either case, we're clearly getting nothing out of talking to each other so I might as well leave off here.

I think if the claims that article makes are both (i) true and (ii) meaningful (as opposed to an annoying artifact of the norms of how these fields operate) we'd be seeing downstream effects of it that we do not see†. I think this is a particularly weird time in the history of biomedical science to be trying to further the argument that everybody is adding cards to a giant house of cards, but you do you.

Either way: people are responding to specific stories about fraudulent research, and my point is that the numerator of those stories is infinitesimal compared to the denominator of how many papers are published in these fields annually, by how many separately-funded R1 research teams.

I'm really not interested in being boxed into a debate about whether p-hacking matters, or scientific fraud exists. Fraud is bad! I'll just keep reiterating that the optimal level of fraud in a large system is almost never zero.

† That article is about a bunch of different fields, and I'm commenting only on a very specific subset of them; fuck do I know how well social science is operating right now

>I'll just keep reiterating that the optimal level of fraud in a large system is almost never zero.

I've been trying to think about what you meant since you wrote this earlier in another comment, and I'm having some trouble wrapping my head around it so I think I'll just ask (if you'd be so kind to explain).

What makes some level of fraud more optimal than zero fraud?

Patrick McKenzie popularized that wording, but I think he may have taken inspiration from Dan Davies, and the idea is older still. It's simply that fraud is endemic to large systems, and past a certain threshold eliminating it makes people worse-off on balance as the countermeasures retard the efficient operation of the system. You can get to zero fraud in lending easily: just don't make loans.

Grinding all scientific research to a halt to "true up" the statistical reporting used for otherwise valid and important research results would be a very good example of an intervention that would (a) "reduce fraud" and (b) leave us all significantly worse off.

I'm in agreement with tptacek and P.McKenzie and feel it's something more generally true; perfection is the enemy of throughput.

Whether it's mine processing, agriculture, bank lending, { insert domain } there are always a number of drags on profit ( fraud, equipment wear and tear, petty theft, holes in fences ) and generally always a threshold past which the cost of pursuit of perfection exceeds the decreasing marginal benefit.

That makes a lot more sense than the literal interpretation. Thanks.

I think that is the literal interpretation.

That is to say, Zero is the optimal in an imaginary system, where cows are spherical and you can make all the assumptions you want.

Once you start working with real world systems with more and complex constraints, the simple story goes away, and perfection is not possible.

The phrasing challenges the reader to question the model with which they are using to define optimal.

We have different definitions of literal, I guess. The first two definitions of "literal" are:

"Conforming or limited to the simplest, nonfigurative, or most obvious meaning of a word or words. "

"Word for word; verbatim."

Taking the sentence in question verbatim would be "some fraud is optimal". The nuanced (non-literal) interpretation is what Thomas wrote.

yes, some level of fraud is optimal in a system. It is literally true.

No...

Sorry, I don't know what to tell you that I didn't already say up thread

In ml basically every paper from a Western university is either useless to industry or not replicable.

It is very much a crisis and one that academia has no interest to solve.

In a sane world we'd start with figuring out what the mystery meat in the version of pytorch used for training is and work up from there. There is zero funding for building up the required infrastructure for doing actual science instead of whatever the fuck you call the current mess.

Basically anything on a more complex dataset than cifar is probably a statistical fluke because of hyper parameter tuning. To find this out you will need to spend three months building up all the bit rotten code that doesn't work from the paper. To draw the conclusion that everyone is full of shit you'll need to waste years of your life.

I'm an AI/ML researcher. If this was true, then we would never have made progress in the first place.

Instead, we're making astounding progress at a rate that no one really would have expected.

Learning to replicate papers is a skill. It's just a matter of practice. You'll get it if you try.

The progress isn't happening at Western universities.

Why you keep emphasihing the "Western" part? Non-western are any better?

Yeah, I can replicate work out of a paper quite easily if half or more of the contributors have Chinese, Indian or Russian email addresses.

A lot of small to medium sized companies fighting for mind share also release one script deploy pipelines for their work, which are better than the academic releases.

It's western universities and big tech that releases at best bit rotten code and at worse no code what so ever.

To a first order approximation all of the progress is happening at Western universities and the companies they founded. Everyone else is playing catch-up.

It's hard to even name mediocre advances that come from anywhere else. As well as the entire hardware and software stack that we have.

You clearly have some sort of political agenda here and not a technical argument.

To a first approximation all breakthroughs are ignored for years until someone else steals them.

Transformers weren't scaled at google because it would eat their ad business. We could have had current level AI in 2020 if they'd been serious about it. They weren't and everyone who worked on it left when the gold rush started without having done anything meaningful in google.

Computer vision, which is the field I've been working on the past few months, is even worse.

Perverts in their basements are getting better than sota image recognition so their wifus have realistic vaginas, and writing tutorials which provide more working insights than any scientific paper.

This isn't a new thing. I dropped out of my PhD working on something similar to AlexNet in 2009 because everyone thought I should just use gradient boosted decision trees like everyone else at the time. I couldn't get $10,000 grant to buy a machine to run the training on.

It isn't just me. Yann LeCun's networks were running the postal service, but he couldn't get a paper published anywhere because it wasn't a hot area to publish in.

But, yeah. Tell me more about how great Western academia is.

Not directly tied to GP's complaints but another thing that often comes up are people complaining about the frivolity of the research without understanding how basic science works. "Can you believe we're paying money to understand fruit fly mating behavior!?!", well yes, because fruit flies are model organisms and developing an understanding of these very mundane sounding things are important before being able to make broader hypotheses

If you cant replicate foundational papers your faculty is a house of cards built on lies.

Wait until you learn about the first unscientific politicized traitor to Freedom in the USA. General George Washington, having survived smallpox himself, ordered the mass variolation (via inoculation, much more dangerous than a vaccine) of the Continental Army to protect troops from the disease, marking one of the first large-scale public health initiatives in American history.

Inoculating the military isn’t public health. Nobody would call today’s military vaccines a “public health program”, its military readiness.

The word “public” is key. You know, the overall population.

I thought this was a militia made up of the public, so a modern comparison would be anyone in the current USA who happens to execute their second amendment rights?

I'm sorry, what?

Pretty sure that would bee illegal in several ways today.

Members of the US military actually get more vaccines and, until recently, had fewer protections with respect to declining them than the typical US citizen (specifically with COVID, Trump has indicated, not sure if he's done it yet, that he'll reinstate people who refused a lawful order to be vaccinated for it; so now I guess they can just refuse any vaccines even if it impacts readiness). During the run up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, US service members were vaccinated for smallpox (appropriate for this thread). That was this century, 30+ years after smallpox was declared eradicated.

They were also vaccinated for other diseases. Join the military and you sign away a lot of your rights (arguably for some good benefits, but we'll see how the new VA head and others treat the veterans and current troops).

I was mostly thinking of how today you'd need three levels of clinical studies and an FDA approval.

The war would be over long before that process concluded.

Or maybe the military can decide to order unapproved vaccines?

COVID was not a scientific crisis. It was an amazing success. We built and rolled out a vaccine in record time.

Science works. Amazingly well. We're making progress on cancer, on many disorders that used to kill or limit many people's lives.

Instead of actually looking at what science does for you constantly, every day, you prefer to attack people.

The result will be tragic. Realistically, your loved ones will die of heart disease or cancer. Sounds like a really smart move to not fund science that will save their lives. Much better to support Trump and save up for their funerals!

Or to put it another way, "The cruelty is the point."

I think arcticbull is saying NIH is not necessary, essentially in favor of the freezes.

I am not in favor of shuttering one of the agencies responsible for public health, although I can see why my comment could be read either way. If you believe in reform there are compassionate ways to do it.

CDC probably does more public health? The work NIH funds through its grant process is not broadly "public health"; it's virtually all American biotechnology research and bio/biochem basic research. Public health deals with the interface of health knowledge and public policy and communication; people credentialed in public health are not, generally, practicing scientists as we'd think about them. NIH grant researchers, on the other hand, are wearing white lab coats and working with fume hoods.

No, HHS does the vast majority of public health research in the US, which includes both CDC and NIH. The CDC budget is roughly a quarter of the NIH budget; most public health research is NIH-funded. The CDC is more operational- they take what is learned and apply it to prevention and treatment.

It may in fact be the case that more HHS-funded public health work is downstream of NIH than of CDC, but NIH is obviously not primarily a public health organization; here's the most recent RePORT data:

https://tinyurl.com/nih-grant-report

> NIH is obviously not primarily a public health organization

They didn't say it was. Or did they edit?

People love that line, but is it true? The premise of this freeze --agree or not-- is that the U.S. Government spends too much.

Or are you suggesting that this is to get back at NIH because of Fauci?

Or, are you saying that Republicans hate cancer research, or...?

If you still believe the republican have principles that they actually believe in, I have a bridge to sell you

> Or are you suggesting that this is to get back at NIH because of Fauci?

Yes, I believe thats a main driver for why this administration does not like the NIH

Considering we had over a hundred million Americans fall ill to a global pandemic that ended barely two years ago, one might conclude that the only reason to hobble the groups that are intended to fight such outbreaks (among many other tasks) would be a poor decision. In fact, one could conclude based on the literal rhetoric from the President and members of his staff, that it’s out of sheer spite.

Which itself is amazing, considering that he was in charge while it happened.

Yeah, sounds right. Let's list the unnecessary drug treatments funded directly by NIH.

The treatment of HIV with AZT and other HAART drugs. AIDS is caused by "poppers" not HIV, duh!

Treatment of breast cancer and Myeloid Leukemia and with Herceptin and Imatinib. Fake cancers!

Vaccines for HPV and Corona viruses are useless, because horse de-wormers treat both! Also, they're not real because COVID and cervical cancer are harmless.

It's time to stop the insanity and realize that jade eggs in your bum are the real solution.

Other useless drugs funded by NIH: Depo-Provera, Taxol, L-DOPA, Propranolol, Tagamet, Embrel, Tamoxifen, Cyclosporin, Warfarin, Methotrexate, Hydrocortisone.

Truly sad that I believed you were being genuine for a second

Poe's Law strikes again.

See, there's my mistake. You could tell. I'll try harder to appear genuine.

They weren't saying the NIH was unnecessary, but since that thread got flagged, it's not easy to see their clarification.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com