spent the morning poking at the large document of cancelled-by-keyword NSF grants. what a mess. they are going to waste a whole generation's worth of science
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I am not going to share names of investigators or grants here, but I regularly read mathematical papers in two fields: algebraic topology, and TCS-adjacent analysis and probability, and have seen a number of cancellations of acquaintances and people whose papers I've read or talks I've attended
in some cases this seems to be literally an over-zealous keyword search, for example if you work on log-sobolev INEQUALITIES, beware. in more cases it's because people added the sentence that no one wanted to add anyway, but which we were all told to include by the previous administrations
a lot of what is cancelled is funding for conferences, and I do think the field will recovery pretty easily from not having conferences. digital rides again... but the attacks on early-career researchers, disappearing post-docs etc—as well as the plain insult of it—will be harder to come back from
to be honest I think there has been a much stronger "positive" brain drain due to people departing for finance or tech, and a much stronger "negative" brain drain due to an insufficient supply of jobs or stability of career path. so far those factors are bigger. but this factor is certainly nasty
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