Thinking about this as slashing science or making it more efficient or short sighted or innovative is all a distraction.

It’s just another opportunity to give money to the friends of those in government and take money from those you don’t. Say want you want about how it used to be, but this and the new rules around “political oversight” are just corruption and grift that are either wearing a mask of ideology or efficiency based on your political stance

I happily had a job in academia in the US. Probably what most would call “successful” after exiting a startup and getting a PhD I was US engineering faculty for 8 years.

We picked up our keys to our new house in another country a few days ago and I start next month with a faculty promotion. Many of my colleagues are or are looking to follow.

Starting with the assumption that all or even most investors / actors are rational is a continuing pox on both economic scholarship and societal thinking

Add to that that the quality of math learning outcomes and math learning in K-12 has gone WAY down. I point this squarely at 2 factors - No child left behind and the rejection of the common core because parents no lnoger felthtey understood the math their kids were learning. (and teachers did not understand math well enough to teach it well as a conceptual matter).

Even if they are getting the grades and even getting the test scores, they increasingly undersstand very little. They are not prepared for understnading they are prepared for question answering. Even in advnaced classes I see students actively reject learning and understanding for just answering - answering is the point they have learned. Right answers are the point, the only point.

A colleague and I were recently talking about what they see their middle nad high schoolers being taught in math classes. They termed it 'calculation as a defense against analysis'

SATs might help some but they aren't the problem they are a stop gap. K-12 (and by extension college) have so heavily sought to (poorly) quantify every aspect of experience to evalute people that they have stripped any meaning from the process. The problem is nothing has useful predictive value anymore in a process that is oversaturated by a 115% increase in the number of decisions an admissions office has to make. Its a math problem more than a cultural or standards problem.

* We does not mean everyon every time - it means the people from whom an official vests their power.

the rate of comits/PRs total

The rate of PRs to repos they don’t own

The reject rate of PRs

The number of ban

An estimated “AI” or bot score or status flag

There are a few better attempts at GitHub metrics calculators but I have not seen any that move beyond the paradigm of more vomits is default assumed good. It’s time to foreground quality not just quantity. The GitHub “4 kpis” are entirely action oriented.

Tells me we can change what police are and aren’t responsible for, and it is telling which ones they want to drop and which ones they don’t.

They are large databases yes but they do a lot of small and large things that that analogy glosses over

As a faculty member at a large university…I have a deep respect for the impossible job of university IT departments.

We originally rolled our on LMS decades ago. When we switched to canvas we kept the home brew running for five years past its expiration date because faculty refused to remove their files. Finally each one was manually moved by IT for the recalcitrant old faculty.

What we don't have access to includes:

* Already graded work

* Ungraded work

* overall adn assignment grades

* lists of students and student emails from the course

* messages from students that are often sent through gradescope

Just...complete implosion.

Theft is a nice analogy here. The default model of theft is property crime but the largest type of theft is wage theft.

If we fret about violence done against individuals but not violence against groups our attention is going to end up steered in a narrow direction.

If this were to actually happen I can only imagine financial liability is the least of their concerns?

What scares me most about this is the narrowness of thought to match this fear with this response.

The police being able to leverage civil law against citizens to control their behavior in ways that citizens cannot leverage against cannot to comment on the abuse of power is entirely unacceptable no matter what our laws and judiciary chose to allow.