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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I did a word search on that article (it's impossible to read with its idiotic presentation), and "musk" is not mentioned.

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Are you being serious? Are you actually not aware that Elon Musk ran the federal government department tasked with cancelling federal grants and firing government employees in 2025? How is it possible that you are not aware of this?

Present some evidence that he cut NSF spending.

A quick Google search will show you... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/26/nati...

You're just willfully ignorant

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?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?

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.

I can go for that, as long as the research proposals are actually about math research.

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.)

> 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.

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.

Thanks for sharing. I don't work on weapons as a matter of deep conviction, so I'll continue to be concerned about this.

My point is math is a weapon.

Forgive me, but I don't exactly follow. This isn't obvious to me.

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.

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.

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

(Edited to add, these are the abstracts, because I can't fit both in one screen /facepalm: https://i.imgur.com/yQKHViO.png)

Maybe there's a different filter or ordering being applied somewhere?

Maybe you and I have different views on what constitutes scientific research.

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

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