Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It probably depends on when the grant cycle was going to pay them. A month ago, all payments were stopped, illegally, until a court continued them. They may continue trying to cancel existing grants, and many politically motivated targets, say anybody at Colombia, are getting hit.

Last I heard all study sections are cancelled, hopefully they resume or there will be no more grants.

A friend just got back from a meeting at NIH on Monday and said that three people got up in the middle and left because NCI had cancelled all travel, so they couldn't continue their talks.

Pediatric cancer has lots of external funding from wealthy families that have been affected by pediatric cancer. My wife also works in pediatric cancer, but most of her funding has come from NCI in recent years rather than private donations. The payment from an existing contract to pay her lab was caught up in the several days of cancellation before being corrected by the courts.

Calling science of "questionable value" is at a minimum a questionable value judgement. Suggesting that the hits are due to somebody looking at the science and deciding "this is good value" is also a very questionable statement.

Moods are bad because the "fuck you" attitude of current management in trying to cut off payments, as well as statements about cutting two thirds of the science budget: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/white-house-budget-p...

Last year, my wife was flown into a beautiful American resort for a conference. It had a hosted a casino night where the top prize was $5000. There was much drinking and dancing, and to be frank the "conference" part of it was an afterthought. One night the whole group of ~200 scientists and entourage was dancing late, drinking, and partying into the early morning hours.

She has admitted she cannot understand the purpose of this, why it was funded, how the budget was deemed acceptable. To be honest, over the past decade she has attended many conferences in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Newport, NYC, Miami, Boston, Chicago, and Austin to name some. The taxpayer dollars allocated to this seem quite suspicious. She doesn't understand why the data can't be presented over Zoom instead of a large conference center with such luxurious accommodations.

Waste is real, even in the sciences we all worship.

I have never heard of a scientific conference with a $5000 prize. Was it a private fundraising conference? Perhaps it was private clinicians? Scientific research conferences are far more austere, but conferences for medical doctors are often like that (they do not usually get paid out of grants).

What you are describing is not normal. Please name the conference and shame it.

> One night the whole group of ~200 scientists and entourage was dancing late, drinking, and partying into the early morning hours.

Oh no, should we not have this? Do you really want to say this should not be happening?

Having conferences in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Newport, NYC, Miami, Boston, Chicago, Austin, is all normal. That is not wasteful. That is the necessary spread of ideas in science.

If your wife cannot understand why the data is not presented over Zoom than she is missing the primary purpose of these conferences which is meeting with lots of people in a short time to establish collaborations, chance encounters with new ideas and people, and other things that are not possible over Zoom. Perhaps she should stop wasting money by attending them and let others attend if she finds them wasteful.

Your representation of science is not the representation that I commonly see, and seems mostly to exist to discredit science. It seems that your intentions are more political rather than to accurately inform about the situation.

You say "political" as if expressing any hesitation whatsoever about how our limited taxpayer dollars are spent is some sort of insane delusion. Maybe think about how the average taxpayer trying to make ends meet would see this.

A conference could simply be inside one of the many large and existing academic buildings at one of our fine universities. Why they need to fly to a Las Vegas conference center is nonsensical

You still didn’t name the conference

Why would I take any chance risking my wife's illustrious career on an internet forum? A career that supports maintenance and taxes on our historic mansion, multiple yearly vacations, our children's private school tuition, and our multiple monthly expensive restaurant meals? You surely must be joking!

Most universities do not contain sufficient capacity to host both the conference and the overnight stays of thousands of people. Even a major university would face significant disruption by hosting a conference, it is simply not built for it. Building venues at each university doesn’t make sense either because it doesn’t have 100% utilization.

Conference venues provide incentives by having cheap venue rent and minor discount on housing and the city makes money by having more people do fun things in their down time.

Purely from efficiency, disregarding politics or “waste” or “delusion”, conference centers are built for a very rational reason - it makes sense and saves money for event organizers.

Their point was fairly straightforward. Don't know why you are mischaracterizing it. They just said that it was weird that state driven budgets are used for splurging on a party, rather than using it purely for the "conference" part, i.e lunch+conference hall+utilities+special guest fees.

Prophylactically responding to your sure-to-come bad faith response, I'm not saying parties should be banned at conferences. If all involved want to indulge, a private sponsor could always fund it.

It is not the least bit established that state driven budgets are paying for this, that wasn't even in the comment. So making that assumption is not merited, much less telling me I should be taking it as evidence.

> Prophylactically responding to your sure-to-come bad faith response,

That you think this is a bad-faith response is a weird way to put it.

I certainly don't want to pay for all the sales kickoff parties and conferences that the employees of my software vendors pay for, yet I still am forced to. Should we run the government like a business, where the benefits of exchange of information is permitted, or should that only be allowed from paid sponsors?

There is a lot of bad faith in this thread but it's odd you should place it on me.

> I certainly don't want to pay for all the sales kickoff parties and conferences that the employees of my software vendors pay for, yet I still am forced to.

Yes, there is a difference between the way you treat government grants versus private voluntary sponsors. Such splurging of others money is bad. That private companies do it is unavoidable and impossible to mitigate. But you can definitely try to avoid it with government money.

> Benefits of exchange of information

You can sugarcoat "parties" how much ever you want, it remains a fact that it is not a necessary aspect of the conference.

Agreed with others that not being willing to name any of these "many" events means it is likely nonsense and manipulative to bring up as it's impossible to shoot down. Likewise, name the cancer research institution who is not feeling the loss of NIH, NCI, VA, etc funding and collaborators.

Ironically, the one deceptive truth I can think of here is still worse than wrong. Big pharma does hold fancy events, including at conferences, as part of how they attract and fund drug trials. However, cutting basic cancer research and the people who do it means the only people who will be left are the big pharma party people that you seem to dislike.

As far as the institution it's very likely St. Judes. They took a ton of Trump money and have floors plastered with Trump family photos to play to their narcissism. St. Judes is also rolling in tons of private donations that most basic hard science would never ever receive. They are also extremely bad at data sharing and have a poor name in the pediatric cancer community for it, even though the amount of money they have collected makes it one of the better places to perform research. So it's likely that St. Judes is completely protected from all the cutoffs, but even if they got the same cutoffs the private money is highly insulating. But as I said, lots of other pediatric cancer researchers are able to live off of private donations in ways that others could only dream of, so any other similarly funded institution (which would be much smaller than St. Judes) would have similar protection. Private donations go to the areas where the donors care, rather than to the areas where the scientific community finds most promising. Nobody is going to get private donations to sequence the genome the first time or build the LHC.

Vague descriptions of wild partying and other "shameful" behavior at a taxpayer-funded scientific conference is a classic attack by conservatives aimed at discrediting, in this case, scientists.

Until you name the conference, I'm just going to label this as conservative bullshit.

I work in science, and it is definitely not normal. Doesn't sound like state funded. Likeky private/industrial sponsorship

That's because your wife works in medicine, not because she does science. The pharmaceutical industry spends enormous amounts of money to influence medical practicioners and researchers.

Actual academic conferences are very different. Budgets are much tighter than in medical conferences, or even in tech conferences. Academics usually have to adhere to the same rules and restrictions as government employees. For example, having wine and/or beer at the conference dinner sometimes depends on private sponsors, as government money cannot be used for alcoholic drinks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com