I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I did want to point out that a big part of what made it possible for Word to displace WordPerfect in the legal world was, literally, the fact that Word implemented full support for WordPerfect's file format including all sorts of weird quirky edge cases.
So, an analogous "Word-killer" today would presumably have to implement all of the docx format's weird quirks etc. On the one hand, the file format is standardized and open, so in principle that should be possible; on the other hand, it's a pretty gnarly file format, with a lot of nooks and crannies. Ironically, I remember hearing once that some of the weirder nooks and crannies of the docx format have their roots in... Word's WordPerfect interoperability features.
And as somebody who recently spent far more time than he expected to trying to reliably get data _out_ of a set of mildly-complicated docx files, I can report that the various fiddly details that the OP notes as being particularly important in the legal domain --- very specific details of paragraph formatting, complex table structures, etc. --- are a huge PITA to deal with when working with the docx format.
It seems to me as though you're reading a lot in to that second paragraph. Are you disputing the basic facts outlined, about "masked agents roaming the streets kidnapping people in broad daylight"? Because that is, in fact, a thing that is happening in cities all over the country right now, and simply pointing out that it is happening is not a partisan act.
It really depends on the specifics of the clinical situation; for a lot of outpatient radiology scenarios the patient and radiologist don't directly interact, but things can be different in an inpatient setting and then of course there are surgical and interventional radiology scenarios.
Umberto Eco gave a pretty well-reasoned definition of Facism, and I think it's pretty straightforward to apply this definition to the situation in London (and DHH's commentary thereon): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
Two points. First, the danger is very real, as the specific administrative mechanism for those final determinations involves political appointees outside of the regular scientific or program review processes, so who knows what they will or won’t understand or what sort of priorities they’ll be working off of.
Second, the programs you’re referring to (“diversity” meaning only people with the right skin color etc.) used a very clear and well-defined model of “under-represented minority” that (in addition to members of this or that minority racial or ethnic group) included women, people from rural zip codes, people who were the first in their families to go to college, people who grew up on free/reduced lunch, and a bunch of other categories that have long been known to be under-represented in science. This definition has been around for decades and there’s been a ton of research about the importance and efficacy of these kinds of programs, some of which are training programs to try and diversify the incoming pipeline of scientists, and some of which were additional funding pools to try and address the very, very, very well-documented gap in early career funding awarded to URM scientists. Characterizing it as just being about skin color is simply inaccurate.
Some of the other “DEI” research that has been terminated consists of projects looking at health issues that are specific to certain populations; the NIH has officially said that health disparities research is still allowed but we are all scratching our heads trying to figure out how to write grants for it that don’t run afoul of the current “rules” which are frankly nonsensical and very “vibe” based so it’s hard to know what will and what won’t be allowed. Almost like they don’t want us to bother trying…
Totally agreed, but I will just add, to your first point, it’s fine for priorities to change, but we do also have well-established statutes that define how changes in administrative rules are supposed to be implemented (eg the Administrative Procedures Act), and at least some of the lawsuits about grant termination have argued that those rules have been being ignored or outright turned inside-out. The district court judge’s written decision in the APHA v NIH case was quite detailed in his explanation of the many, many, many ways that the APA was grossly violated. So yes, priorities are allowed to change, but we have a system in place to manage that; otherwise we are, as Justice Jackson put it this week, playing Calvinball which IMHO is no way to run a country. At a micro level, it’s really painful to spend months writing a grant, more months waiting for it to come up for review, and then at the last second have it get administratively bounced because of new “rules” that didn’t exist when the grant was written or submitted (as happened to me earlier this year).
You are of course correct that it’s utterly bananas that in 225 we are wasting our time trying to guess which words shouldn’t be used in grant applications, and that our colleagues at the CDC and NIH are having to do the same for their papers.
To do those things, I do the same thing I've been doing for the thirty years that I've been programming professionally: I spend the (typically modest) time it takes to learn to understand the code that I am integrating into my project well enough to know how to use it, and I use my brain to convert my ideas into code. Sometimes this requires me to learn new things (a new tool, a new library, etc.). There is usually typing involved, and sometimes a whiteboard or notebook.
Usually it's not all that much effort to glance over some other project's documentation to figure out how to integrate it, and as to creating working code from an idea or plan... isn't that a big part of what "programming" is all about? I'm confused by the idea that suddenly we need machines to do that for us: at a practical level, that is literally what we do. And at a conceptual level, the process of trying to reify an idea into an actual working program is usually very valuable for iterating on one's plans, and identifying problems with one's mental model of whatever you're trying to write a program about (c.f. Naur's notions about theory building).
As to why one should do this manually (as opposed to letting the magic surprise box take a stab at it for you), a few answers come to mind:
1. I'm professionally and personally accountable for the code I write and what it does, and so I want to make sure I actually understand what it's doing. I would hate to have to tell a colleague or customer "no, I don't know why it did $HORRIBLE_THING, and it's because I didn't actually write the program that I gave you, the AI did!"
2. At a practical level, #1 means that I need to be able to be confident that I know what's going on in my code and that I can fix it when it breaks. Fiddling with cmakes and npms is part of how I become confident that I understand what I'm building well enough to deal with the inevitable problems that will occur down the road.
3. Along similar lines, I need to be able to say that what I'm producing isn't violating somebody's IP, and to know where everything came from.
4. I'd rather spend my time making things work right the first time, than endlessly mess around trying to find the right incantation to explain to the magic box what I want it to do in sufficient detail. That seems like more work than just writing it myself.
Now, I will certainly agree that there is a role for LLMs in coding: fancier auto-complete and refactoring tools are great, and I have also found Zed's inline LLM assistant mode helpful for very limited things (basically as a souped-up find and replace feature, though I should note that I've also seen it introduce spectacular and complicated-to-fix errors). But those are all about making me more efficient at interacting with code I've already written, not doing the main body of the work for me.
> State law does not require a woman to notify authorities when she miscarries, but Truman said that women who miscarry in West Virginia can protect themselves against potential criminal charges by reporting the miscarriage to local law enforcement.
>
> “Call your doctor. Call law enforcement, or 911, and just say, ‘I miscarried. I want you to know,'” advised Truman.
Now, in fairness, the state's association of prosecutors has clarified that this is not official policy and that the association as a whole does not support it. But it's definitely not out of the realm of possibility.
Excellent point; the administration has a serious and well-publicized antipathy to mRNA vaccine technologies in particular, and has begun to suppress research in that direction. Given that mRNA vaccines are one of the biggest advances in vaccine technology in decades, and that mRNA-related techniques are key to many of the most promising methods for treating a whole host of rare diseases etc., it seems absurd that we would intentionally be seeking out agnotology in this space, but here we are.
In the case of this specific post, it is unfortunately very appropriate to bring him up: his administration is enthusiastically setting back the US’s ability to study, treat, and cure cancer by years and possibly decades; his cuts at the FDA are setting back the availability of new therapies and his cuts to AHRQ and are undermining our ability to study whether the ones we have work; and his proposed budget would strip access to healthcare (including cancer screening and relevant preventative care) from tens of millions of Americans. Oh and his administration’s attack on higher education, and his immigration policies relating thereto, are gutting our scientific and biomedical workforces.
So while I am as sick as anybody about hearing about him, on a thread about advances in cancer treatments, it would be awfully weird to ignore the elephant in the room. Just sayin’.
In case anybody’s interested, Malka Older has a really enjoyable series (two books so far) of short novels set on habitats in Jupiter’s atmosphere (so not breathable atmosphere, but also not vacuum). They’re solid mystery stories with fun characters and an intriguing setting. The first is called “The Mimicking of Known Successes” and the second is “The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles”.
Ages and ages ago a group of colleagues of mine did a study of faxing Arabic-language prescriptions- the low resolution of the fax machine, as well as the textured appearance of the forgery-resistant paper that prescriptions had to be printed on, meant that diacritic marks got smudged in ways that were leading to clinically-meaningful confusion on the part of the reader. Here's their paper about it: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22178294/
There is indeed a lot of evidence of this but you've got the direction backwards- it's not that women avoid studies, it's that for a long time studies specifically excluded women. Ditto for people of different races. This is why these days (well, as of today, at least) the NIH has a whole set of very well-established policies around inclusion in clinical trials that include sex, race, and age: https://grants.nih.gov/policy-and-compliance/policy-topics/i...
And this isn't for "DEI" reasons, it's literally because for decades there used to be drug trials that excluded women and as a result ended up releasing drugs that gave half the population weird side effects that didn't get caught during the trials, or just plain didn't work as well on one group or another in ways that were really hard to debug once the drug was on the market. That was legit bad science, and the medical research world has worked very hard over the last thirty years to do better. We are admittedly not there yet, but things are a lot better than they used to be.
For a really interesting take on the history of racial exclusion and bias in medicine, I recommend Uché Blackstock's recent book "Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons With Racism In Medicine" which gave a great overview.
Oh! And also everybody should read Abby Norman's "Ask Me About My Uterus," it gives a fabulous history of issues around women's health.
Without getting into the question of what it means for the pandemic to be "over", I think it's relevant to point out that at least some of the cancelled grants are not studying COVID per se, but rather are studying things relevant to preparing for the next pandemic. Jeremy Berg (a former director of NIGMS) has some commentary, and mentions that the AVIDD program was among those that were terminated: https://bsky.app/profile/jeremymberg.bsky.social/post/3lla4k...
This was a large program that funded general research into antiviral drugs- again, in preparation for next time.
Going on the experience of the last couple of weeks, and what we have seen in terms of grant and program terminations, I would not be surprised if they did a big grep for the substring "COVID" and used that as their starting point for finding things to cut, without actually paying attention to what the grants were really studying.
First of all, I don’t accept the a priori premise that cutting is needed. But if I did want to cut, I would want to have an actual plan for how to figure out what could be cut and what tradeoffs were involved, and then to execute that plan in way that balanced as many equities as possible and was done in a way that followed some sane and transparent process (as well as relevant laws).
Part of that might involve being able to show some kind of financial analysis about what was being cut, to justify it and to get buy-in from congress and other relevant stakeholders, and to do the cuts in a way that minimized their impacts, gave everybody who was going to be affected adequate time to be part of the process, and to plan for how to manage their side of the situation.
Needless to say, what we are seeing now is… none of those things.
A good example of what a saner process might look like would be the federal workforce reductions that followed a big analysis on government efficiency that Al Gore and his team led during the first Clinton presidency; look up the Federal Workforce Restructuring Act of 1994 to see how it all went down. They spent six months making a plan, then got it through congress to fund buyouts (it passed with major bipartisan support).
I’m here to say that the cuts to the NSF, NIH, DoE (both energy and education) and IRS are not overhyped at all; if anything they are badly underhyped.
What is overhyped is the actual “savings” that they are producing with all of this.
Presumably a lot of the funds in the terminated grants were for running programs that had other direct costs beyond pure headcount…
That’s the thing that isn’t being reported well, IMHO: federal grants aren’t just gifts that the government gives universities, they are contracts for universities to perform services (conducting very specific research programs with well-specified deliverables, running very specific educational activities for carefully defined populations of learners, etc.).
Those are fair questions! My answer to the first one is in three parts:
1. In absolute terms, the amount of money we're talking about (e.g. NSF+NIH) is a drop in the bucket compared to $2T; it's been well-covered elsewhere, but scientific research funding simply isn't a significant contributor to the federal budget (and its deficit). It's a rounding error next to defense, social security, medicare, and medicaid.
2. Basic scientific research is an investment in our grandchildren's lives and health, and one that (as described in the article) historically has resulted in a very good rate of financial return.
3. When trying to cut costs, it is important not to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. These decisions are difficult, and if we want to have a hard look at what science gets funded, that's fine... but we need to do that in some kind of organized, serious, and systematic way, and that process absolutely has to involve the people doing the work at some level, as well as (ideally) other stakeholders (e.g. the people who might be affected by whatever the research would be accomplishing). A chainsaw is not the right tool for that job.
Besides funding of new research grants, the bigger impact is actually in education, training, and workforce development. Training grants are being badly affected, and because of the threats to indirect costs and the general uncertainty about future research funding levels, many universities are dramatically decreasing their number of PhD admissions this year, or eliminating them altogether. I also know of several programs aimed at scientific workforce development that are on the chopping block, and we are worried about our existing students losing their funding mid-way through their PhDs. Again, that's not "steering", unless you mean "steering" in the sense of "steering American science off a cliff". We are, in the most literal possible sense, eating our seed corn. I'm reminded of that reservoir in California that was recently ordered to dump a bunch of water, which means that the farmers in that part of the state won't have as much as they are going to need this summer. That's what is happening in science right now, as we speak.
Secondly, I don't quite know how to say this, but it's not really the executive's job to decide which grants get funded. That's up to the scientific and programmatic leadership at funding agencies, together with the existing and well-defined scientific peer review process. We did indeed just have an election, but our system of government is very much not a dictatorship. This is literally part of why Congress set up dedicated agencies to administer scientific and medical research; those projects need to persist beyond any single election and need to be insulated somewhat from day-to-day politics. Congress making those funding decisions was also an expression of democracy in action.
Also, this is why funding agencies are staffed by career civil servants with domain expertise, and why funding agencies have extremely well-documented and carefully designed peer review processes in place, and why scientists from all over the country give up lots of time to participate in those processes several times per year. Undermining all of this process and structure --- which is in place to try and mitigate biases and ensure as much objectivity as is possible in an inherently subjective world --- is one of the best ways I can imagine to ensure that government-funded research becomes more ideologically-driven, not less.
The teams I mentioned all support dozens of investigators and their associated labs, they are shared resources. That’s part of the point of centralizing overhead costs at the university level via an indirect cost mechanism- if every lab had to do all of that we’d be wasting tons of money and time, but by centralizing it we get economies of scale. Tragically, my own lab’s budget is nowhere near the level that I could support enough financial help on my own… ;-)
And yes, many of the examples I listed are there for regulatory reasons, and that’s a good thing. We have laws around IRBs for good reasons, and it’s very important to have professional support in making sure we are doing things the right way in that regard. Data use agreements are important- when subjects share their personal data with me so I can study it, they do so with the understanding that it will be handled properly and part of how we do that is via data use agreements, and we need professionals to help with that because I certainly didn’t learn enough about contract law in grad school to do a good job with it on my own.
There is obviously a conversation to be had about whether a particular regulation is appropriate or whether there’s too much of this or that red tape, and I think every scientist would be able to tell stories of administrative annoyance. But it’s absurd to argue that the solution is to burn it all down indiscriminately, which is what we’re seeing.
So, an analogous "Word-killer" today would presumably have to implement all of the docx format's weird quirks etc. On the one hand, the file format is standardized and open, so in principle that should be possible; on the other hand, it's a pretty gnarly file format, with a lot of nooks and crannies. Ironically, I remember hearing once that some of the weirder nooks and crannies of the docx format have their roots in... Word's WordPerfect interoperability features.
And as somebody who recently spent far more time than he expected to trying to reliably get data _out_ of a set of mildly-complicated docx files, I can report that the various fiddly details that the OP notes as being particularly important in the legal domain --- very specific details of paragraph formatting, complex table structures, etc. --- are a huge PITA to deal with when working with the docx format.