What NIH purports to do here is illegal. In annual appropriations bills for the past several years, Congress has specifically banned NIH from changing indirect costs:
congress.gov/118/plaws/publ… x.com/NIH/status/188… Even without that specific language in appropriations bills, what NIH is trying to do would still be unlawful.

Indirect costs are negotiated with HHS based on detailed federal rules in 47 CFR part 75.

Agencies can't just rewrite CFR by a tweet.ecfr.gov/current/title-…

Someone needs to decide:

Is the goal to improve government efficiency, or to cut government waste?

These are very different!

If the idea is to prevent every case in which government allegedly wasted money, the result will be ENORMOUS bureaucracy, not efficiency.

https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1856538974384255206

In 1988, Stanford famously charged depreciation on a yacht to the federal government.

The resulting federal crackdown led to "red tape and organizational disaster."

It would have been far cheaper and more efficient just to pay for the occasional yacht.journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00…

The Network State conference has been going on in Amsterdam.

Lots of interesting talks here:

Based on the agenda, the impetus is about creating alternative institutions--alternatives to college, currency, etc. Very cool!

But I'm still puzzled . . .youtube.com/@thenetworksta… From Balaji's opening talk today, he's still pushing the idea of a literal country that has diplomatic recognition and that consists of 50+ geographic locations around the world, all of which are embedded in existing countries:

It's easy to romanticize the past . . .

My grandfather was born in this farmhouse in Arkansas. Life was so hard that he couldn't afford new shoes--he had to repair old shoes with tire rubber.

He hoped I would grow up to "get an indoors job."

google.com/maps/@36.39537… Which I did.

Am I happier than him? Hard to say -- incommensurability of personal experiences, hedonic adaptation, etc.

But with my allergies, I suspect I'd feel like him if I had to spend all day in the dust, wind, and sun, cleaning out barns with animal excrement, etc.

UT professor Paul von Hippel and I published a piece today in Nature Human Behavior. The title: "Improve academic search engines to reduce scholars' biases." A problem that we notice with Google Scholar is that it's often hard to surface replications. Highly-cited articles are prioritized in search results because they are highly-cited, even if there's a failed replication that deserves equal placement.

I've been seeing this story a lot on Twitter today: floridahealth.gov/newsroom/2022/…

Headline: Florida Surgeon General shows that there is an "84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination" But it's one of the worst studies I've ever seen. It doesn't show what you might think, not even close.

Here's why.

Important new paper from Larry Orr, Rob Olsen, @lizstuartdc, and others. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.100… In thinking about evidence-based policy, policymakers might often wonder, "Will the results of one evaluation/RCT apply to my jurisdiction?"

Orr et al. look at three RCTs in education (one on 36 charter schools, one on ed tech in 132 schools, and one on 84 Head Start centers).

I was going to write up a response to this PNAS piece: Redish et al., “Reproducibility failures are essential to scientific inquiry.” pnas.org/content/115/20… But I realized that 1) PNAS might not publish it; 2) Even if they did, it would take a long time; 3) Posting my thoughts on Twitter would probably reach more people (about 2,000 people minimum, and a lot more depending on retweets).