The statement, "everything is just people" begs the question. That question is about appropriate roles.
No one is debating that Congress has the power of the purse. That is one of their primary roles. They appropriate, but obviously cannot and should not make every detailed decision, particularly where expertise is required and political neutrality is preferred. Accountability is another primary Congressional role. That comes through oversight, not day-to-day decision making on behalf of those being overseen.
Even if it were desirable to have politicians making decisions in place of scientists, granting that decision-making power to political appointees instead of Congress actually undermines the public's representation and further shifts the balance of power to the Executive.
That's exactly what I meant when I said: "the important question is: who are the people who have the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent?" The answer obviously is: political actors. Ultimately it's Congress. And sometimes Congress has delegated that role to the President.
Within that framework, the institutional principles of "science" are irrelevant, except insofar as those principles are persuasive to political actors and ultimately voters.
The problem scientific institutionalists face is that they've squandered a lot of public trust over the decades. The left is skeptical of revolving doors between expert agencies and corporations and corporate sponsorship of scientific studies, while the right is skeptical that experts' politics aren't coloring their work. And in such an environment, it's entirely within voters' rights to elect political actors who promise to delegate fewer decisions to scientists.
You've restated your flawed assertions, you continue to reassign the roles, and you're conflating Congress with political appointees.
>The problem scientific institutionalists face is that they've squandered a lot of public trust over the decades
The left generally trusts science and the scientific community, while the right has fallen prey to the right-wing war on science and truth. This war was explicitly designed to enable exactly what is happening here—the transfer of more power to the right, rationalized by a seeded distrust of institutions.
Hence, it's not surprising that the people who want political appointees in charge of science are on the right.
> You've restated your flawed assertions, you continue to reassign the roles, and you're conflating Congress with political appointees.
That's at best a misunderstanding of the GP's argument, at worst a bad-faith response. GP said:
> "the important question is: who are the people who have the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent?" The answer obviously is: political actors. Ultimately it's Congress. And sometimes Congress has delegated that role to the President.
That is 100% correct. Congress controls spending. Congress delegated the details of that role in this case to the president, and the president wants political appointees making these decisions, not scientists and subject matter experts.
I don't like this state of affairs, but it seems to be an entirely legal one, consistent with the constitution and how our political system is set up. It sucks, but in 2024 the people decided that this is who they wanted in charge.
> The left generally trusts science and the scientific community
I'm not sure that's actually true in general. The left certainly is much more trusting of scientists than the right, but that trust is not absolute, and things have happened (like initial COVID response, as an example) to erode some of that trust.
> while the right has fallen prey to the right-wing war on science and truth.
No. Analyze the thread more carefully, particularly the original comment to which I replied. Should help any good faith reader to see that it's the opposite.
>That is 100% correct. Congress controls spending
You'll see that I actually introduced that fact originally to clearly delineate the roles, whereas GP was blurring / reassigning them to make his point. I added that Congress's other major role here is in oversight, which corrects the GP's assertion that political appointees are needed for accountability to the people. i.e. I'm saying that mechanism exists, Consitutionally. That destroys his primary argument—that this is about accountability.
You seemed to have overlooked that fact (in addition to my other points), in much the same style as GP. Perhaps his rhetoric has worked on you a bit here.
>Congress delegated the details of that role in this case to the president, and the president wants political appointees making these decisions, not scientists and subject matter experts.
That is not what's happening here, and reads like a complete misunderstanding or calculated twisting. The "in this case" bit is actively misleading. The OMB already executes spend management. There is no special "case" here. The regime is using the OMB to politicize the process by claiming it was partisan—i.e. using the same well-worn tactic in its ongoing attack on science and other matters.
>I'm not sure that's actually true in general
Of course it's true. Statistically.
>that trust is not absolute
Never the assertion. Immaterial.
>and things have happened (like initial COVID response
In fact, the left experienced a temporary bounce in scientific confidence during the initial COVID response, before settling down to pre-pandemic baselines. Meanwhile, the right experienced a roughly 20 point drop in confidence that has persisted.
Many of us did vote for sane ideas, like allowing scientists to make decisions about science. For instance, we knew RFK Jr would be a disaster and here we are, dealing with a resurgence of preventable diseases.
In fact, "unelected bureaucrats" have been the key to whatever degree of success this democracy has enjoyed. Politicizing everything replaces non-partisan expertise with political loyalty and favoritism. It's a direct path to the destruction of critical institutions, undermining the public trust, and authoritarianism.
Perhaps if we'd had "unelected bureaucrats" in the 1800s, we would have done even better? Hard to say, really.
We had all these "unelected bureaucrats" post-WWII, and we did quite well in the following decades.
Scientists and academics fleeing the US is a new phenomenon, driven in no small part by these "unelected bureaucrats" being fired and replaced by political loyalists.
While you're correct in saying that we had lots of success before the establishment of the administrative state, it doesn't then follow that we'd have more (or better) success by abolishing it now. It seems like the opposite is slowly becoming true.
>I guess Fidelity doesn't want to help fund hate groups
Your "guess" is not the stated reason. FTA:
>“Consistent with our grant-making standards and practices, the organization is not an eligible grant recipient during the ongoing investigation.”
In fact, WRT Fidelity's actual disposition on funding hate groups, the SPLC reported in 2023 that their donor advised fund had been consistently used to that effect, including anti-LGBTQ, anti-government, anti-Muslim, and hard right groups.[0]
>They still get more engagement on X than on Bluesky.
Is this the right metric? Or would having 98% of their impressions lopped off by the platform factor in? What if they were 100% suppressed? Would it still be "political" for them to leave? If not, then what's the threshhold?
And, if the platform is suppressing them, then isn't it the platform that's playing politics? How are they absolved, and why should EFF stick around to give them its imprimatur of legitimacy / neutrality?
Perhaps you're considering only the European theater, but even that would have been significantly more challenging for Russia without the U.S. tying up (and degrading) Axis resources and manpower throughout Europe and elsewhere (e.g. the Pacific). Japan could have very well opened an eastern front for Russia.
And, it was the U.S. that forced a two front war that prevented Germany's fuller focus on Russia's western front (millions fewer troops). Not to mention U.S. logistical and material support to the Soviet Union, which may well have prevented their industrial collapse.
Even with all of this support, the fatality rates for Russia were astronomical. To this day, it boggles my mind that one nation lost ~26 million people in a single war.
Hard to imagine how they would have succeeded without the U.S.
>a strong and thorough idea of what you want, broken up into hundreds of smaller problems, with specific architectural steers on the really critical pieces.
Serious question: at what point is it easier to just write the code?
Depends. If you have written other Tower Defense games then it’s probably really close to that line. If you just took a CS class in high school then this vibe approach is probably 20x faster.
My aunt would always tell me that making fresh pasta or grounding your own meat was basically just as fast as buying it. And while it may have have been true for her it definitely wasn’t for me.
And if it's a work project, you're going to spend a few years working on the same tech. So by the time you're done, there's going to be templates, snippets,... that you can quickly reuse for any prototyping with the tech. You would be faster by the fact that you know that it's correct and you don't have to review it. Helps greatly with mental load. I remember initializing a project in React by lifting whole modules out of an old one. Those modules could have been libraries the way they were coded.
>You would be faster by the fact that you know that it's correct and you don't have to review it. Helps greatly with mental load.
I keep thinking maybe it's me who's just not getting the vibe coding hype. Or maybe my writing vs reading code efficiency is skewed towards writing more than most people's. Because the idea of validating and fixing code vs just writing it doesn't feel efficient or quality-oriented.
Then, there's the idea that it will suddenly break code that previously worked.
Overall, I keep hearing people advocating for providing the AI more details, new approaches/processes/etc. to try to get the right output. It makes me wonder if things might be coming full circle. I mean, there has to be some point where it's better to just write the code and be done with it.
>There was a time when Musk and his fans were riding a wave of enthusiasm, but with Tesla and Starship problems they've dialed it back.
That's the thing though: those stans were (and still are on some other platforms) very vocal, irrespective of his copious ups and downs (e.g. prior Tesla problems, Twitter debacle, provocative/bad behavior, etc).
In fact, it seemed the worse things were the more vocal they became (like a PR army), and that included here on HN until very recently, IMO.
You can only promise people self-driving cars and Mars and so on, while actually giving them a somewhat worse Twitter and breaking the government, before they eventually get sick of you, I suppose.
Like, I'm sure there are still die-hard Musk superfans out there, but you've got to imagine that a lot of his followers eventually became disillusioned.
I've noticed this happening on HN with other stuff to some extent; way back in the day HN was one of the most Bitcoin-enthusiastic places out there, but that tide eventually turned. Same for NFTs. Arguably you can now see it starting to happen for AI.
No one is debating that Congress has the power of the purse. That is one of their primary roles. They appropriate, but obviously cannot and should not make every detailed decision, particularly where expertise is required and political neutrality is preferred. Accountability is another primary Congressional role. That comes through oversight, not day-to-day decision making on behalf of those being overseen.
Even if it were desirable to have politicians making decisions in place of scientists, granting that decision-making power to political appointees instead of Congress actually undermines the public's representation and further shifts the balance of power to the Executive.
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