Item — HN Reader

> Why on earth would this be the case? Do you hear yourself? Here’s the answer: no, obviously.

I have no skin in the game. I just hypothesised as to why the timing might overlap with your new government's crusade

> If Elon thinks they’re too high, the new administration can negotiate them more vigorously next time around. They can take a position of across the board cuts if they want, but obviously the outcome is likely to be fewer orgs accepting the negotiated rates, I.e. they have just cut research

But the NSF, and every single private grant foundations, operates at ~15% rates. Why would the NIH converging to the same rate affect anything?

> Are we supposed to ignore the actual impacts of a decision and instead refer to it by its alleged intent?

No, you're just supposed to avoid lossy compression.

"NIH cuts research funding for administrative overhead. This could impact cancer research"

Is a better, factual statement. It separates the objective, factual, action taken by the NIH and your hypothesised effect of that action on two separate sentences and qualifies the hypothesis with "could".

1 comments

You really do have skin in the game, given how many medicines you use and will use are also developed with NIH funding.

Have you considered whether this was driven by the relative positions of Jupiter and Mercury? Or perhaps by the swirling of the tea leaves in Musk’s cup? It’s driven by a reckless attempt to reduce spending without having to think through the consequences because it’d take “too long.”

I’m not arguing that the overhead rates are correct or can’t be lower. I’m saying if you take a sports car to the shop and they start tearing parts out because “hey that looks different than the one in the Corolla,” you’d go to a different mechanic.

There is no reason to be jolting any of these systems this severely. The entire emergency is contrived in order to force through an ideological purification.

All language is lossy compression, obviously. Your version just overlays wishful thinking.

> You really do have skin in the game, given how many medicines you use and will use are also developed with NIH funding.

I meant to say that I don't have an opinion on the DEI angle, it doesn't affect me in any way in another country.

> There is no reason to be jolting any of these systems this severely. The entire emergency is contrived in order to force through an ideological purification.

Whether it is needed or not, and the motivation for it is completely unrelated to what I said.

> Your version just overlays wishful thinking.

No, it is more factual. There is no reason your hypothesis that it will affect medical research will be true, especially given the rates are just being brought to standard, so unless you can provide a concrete justification, you need to qualify it with "could" like I did, otherwise you are communicating misinformation, there is simply no two ways about it.

> All language is lossy compression, obviously.

This is pedantry. You can't claim that and proceed to throw away important information like what is fact and what is hypothesis when compressing, especially when said fact is a historical action taken by someone.

> Have you considered whether this was driven by the relative positions of Jupiter and Mercury? Or perhaps by the swirling of the tea leaves in Musk’s cup? It’s driven by a reckless attempt to reduce spending without having to think through the consequences because it’d take “too long.”

> Your version just overlays wishful thinking.

Sounds like your version is driven by inherent bias, rather than a coherent argument against what I said - why bringing the administrative overhead rates _equal_ to what is allowed by the NSF, _every_ other grant, and the NIH itself just a few years back, would magically affect research.

It isn’t “administrative overhead.” It’s indirect costs.

Does research happen in buildings? Yes.

Is that an indirect cost? Yes.

What happens when you can’t pay to use buildings? You can’t do research in them.

Private foundations and other grantors can pay lower overhead because universities are often losing money on those programs and footing the difference.

Again, I am not suggesting the rates need to be where they have wound up. I am saying that you cannot remove 50%+ of a program’s budget overnight and expect not to disrupt or potentially fatally damage its operations.

Thinking a research university can lose tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year in funding and not cut research is beyond naive.