I will not miss the “DEI” components of NSF proposals (or the PIER part of the DOE ones), especially having been on the review panel side about 5 times now. It’s not that I disagree with their intent, but the fact that after you’ve read a few you realize that proposers know exactly what they are expected to write there, so they write that there. Those sections are basically a useless going-through-the-motions exercise, and everyone knows it. I’ve never seen a proposal win or lose, or even change positions in a tie break, based on that content. More or less we just look to see that it exists, indicate that existence in the review form, and concentrate on the actual content. It’s a performative waste of everyone’s time.
This is a bit disingenuous: there is no "DEI" component of NSF proposals. There is a Broader Impacts section which is mandated by law - the America Competes Act of 2010, which congress passed. https://www.congress.gov/111/plaws/publ358/PLAW-111publ358.p... It states that:
GOALS.—The Foundation shall apply a Broader Impacts
Review Criterion to achieve the following goals:
(1) Increased economic competitiveness of the United
States.
(2) Development of a globally competitive STEM workforce.
(3) Increased participation of women and underrepresented
minorities in STEM.
(4) Increased partnerships between academia and industry.
(5) Improved pre-K–12 STEM education and teacher
development.
(6) Improved undergraduate STEM education.
(7) Increased public scientific literacy.
(8) Increased national security.
That's it. I've won many NSF proposals and have never talked about DEI. Instead we talk about outreach work we do with local schools, our involving undergraduate students in research who would not otherwise be able to volunteer their time, and of course the economic impacts of working on these topics.
An executive order cannot override the law authorizing the National Science Foundation and its activities. We are, for now, a country of laws.
> I’ve never seen a proposal win or lose, or even change positions in a tie break, based on that content
This is an absolutely wild statement, because my experience has been the complete opposite. I've seen a zillion times where a straight white guy was passed over specifically to achieve DEI goals.
I don't think the pro-DEI crowd understands how discriminatory DEI initiatives became in many institutions and how that's the root of the anti-DEI backlash.
I've lost count of the number of times I've seen the best X (candidate, project, company, whatever) get rejected because they were unacceptably white and male, so that the job/grant/contract could go to a DEI candidate instead.
Heck, I was on an interview committee where the recruiters and hiring manager openly admitted they weren't interviewing male candidates, and we spent 3 months interviewing 100% of female candidates who applied while hundreds of male applicants got ghosted. That one was more explicit than most, but the same phenomenon has been happening for years at every layer of academia, business and government.
The post your are talking about is specifically about NSF proposals. Your experience with interviewing, project choice, contracting or whatever you are referring to is a different thing. It's not so wild to imagine that a different thing has different practices.
I've never found this argument of the anti-DEI crowd to be very convincing, because it inherently implies that without DEI measures, such decisions would be entirely meritocratic.
>I don't think the pro-DEI crowd understands how discriminatory DEI initiatives became in many institutions and how that's the root of the anti-DEI backlash.
Nobody cared as long as the discrimination is happening to white men. That's why people voted for Trump this time.
It's the societal backlash you get when you try to force equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity.
As context, the NSF requires grant writers to include a “broader impacts” section [1] in every grant proposal. This includes things like improving education, national security, economic competitiveness, and also inclusion - for example, ideas to attract more talent from underrepresented groups. So every NSF proposer works hard to satisfy the NSF on this requirement. I happen to think that these are worthwhile goals (we shouldn’t be wasting our limited talent due to historical crankiness) and simultaneously I believe the sections ends up being a bit performative. If the NSF were to change its criteria for grants going forward I might disagree with that approach but it would be consistent with what I’ve heard from these folks, ie they think “DEI” is getting in the way of science. However: the current approach is just destructive: if involves asking researchers to augment their proposals with these goals, and then retroactively refuses to pay already-awarded grant recipients who did what they were asked to.
I will leave the question of whether this is constitutional to other folks. I will even leave aside the question of whether we can afford to defund science in our current crazy geopolitical environment. The real point here is that this is just plain wrong.
I'm a bit confused, or maybe I've been doing it wrong. DEI-related things don't usually go in Broader Impacts, do they? When I've written grants, Broader Impacts was just generally for "how is your research going to help society?"; it was the Broadening Participation in Computing section that was oriented toward DEI.
I think broader impact section is good. Whether it should be weighted as high as it was is up to debate. I personally think it was becoming too important for the success of the proposal.
But obviously the new administration is not interested in any sort of nuanced debate, but rather ideological purge.
I agree that the goals are worthwhile, and also feel that requiring every proposal to include this is not efficient and/or very effective. They should take all the funds and time spent on this every year as part of every award, and just fund programs specifically designed to attract inner-city kids to science, or funnel talented, low-income, high school students to be mentored, taught advanced classes, etc.
I would be happy to spend time mentoring URM, etc. But it'd work a lot better if others managed such a program, thought about how to attract them, etc. Specialization is good.
That seems like a reasonable middle ground to me. But I didn't have any problem with DEI. If you have inner-city kids underrepresented by 50% then fund according to %population * %underrepresnted -- if 25% population then 12.5% of funding for programs to increase participation (don't think it would be that high). Maybe divide that by N if you have N different groups you would like to be more represented (eg rural kids). Performance is just that. Funding would be more effective. I expect anti-DEI folks would like the funding effort even less than the performance effort. It's obvious they believe diversity itself is part of the problem (whether admitted or not).
> they believe diversity itself is part of the problem (whether admitted or not).
they admit it. President Trump stated unambiguously that the recent crash and tragic loss of life is due to DEI hires, even though all the pilots and air traffic controllers involved were able-bodied white (presumably
heterosexual and cis-gendered) men.
> Asked by a reporter how he could blame diversity programmes for the crash when the investigation had only just begun, the president responded: "Because I have common sense."
Why is anyone who isn't part of his cult still listening to a word he says?
The man lies when his lips move. There's no value to be gained with actually intellectually engaging on any of this. He didn't reason himself into anything he believes in, it makes no sense to reason about it.
The language he really speaks is that of power - 'I do it because I can', and of propaganda - 'I say this because it benefits me to'.
I listen because he controls the most powerful army in history and can crush my country's economy if we don't allow his gang of oligarchs to mess with our democracy.
When the US sneezes, the whole world catches a cold.
Sure, you listen in the same way that you listen to the demands of an armed gunman in a store.
But you can't engage with trying to find any sense in it. His administration does not live in the same reality that anyone else does. Repeating the lies only gives them undeserved legitimacy.
Do you have any thoughts (which you feel comfortable sharing) on the actual effectiveness or otherwise of these initiatives? Setting aside the dogma on both sides, do they achieve their stated aims?
It's difficult to isolate the effects of DEI - there are far too many confounding factors interfering. You might use effective masking when analyzing a submission that removes your own personal biases, but, after the hire, there is no way to hide the difference that could have impacted your assessment.
Keeping biases in check is a daily exercise. I am aware of many of my own biases and I have to continuously fight back. There are people whose company I enjoy more than others, but I can't let that interfere with my professional judgment.
I agree that there's not much information to be gathered from a small sample, but there ought to be some tangible effects at the macro level. Is academia actually becoming more equal due to these initiatives? Are researchers who are hired as a result of inclusivity programmes as effective as researchers who are hired outside those programmes? These are things we ought to be able to measure.
Brazil has some long running DEI programs for public colleges and universities and the general conclusion is that minority students who performed worse in admission tests but were enrolled based on quotas show very similar academic performance to the students who came from wealthier backgrounds. Some data hints that they perform better than their non DEI colleagues.
I work for a university. I know that for several undergraduate degree programmes (not by any means all of them, but several) we've measured and there's no evidence of any correlation between the academic achievements in related subjects prior to study and the eventual degree classification.
Since apparently there's no point in testing them for "aptitude" or we don't know how to do so, it makes sense to have other criteria such as broadening participation.
Or, you know, enrol the ones who'd be better on your sports teams, or who look prettier for prospectus photos, or something - just don't fool yourself that you care about some sort of pre-existing "talent".
SAT/ACT scores are the best predictors of undergrad GPA as well as probability to have high income in the future, largely independent on the socio-economic background [1].
Without going into the discussion about polarized points. I have some observations
1- NSF budget is about 10 billions, I always had in mind that it is much more. That's about 0.17% of the total federal budget. If we include DOE R&D funding and NIH we will get to 1%. This is the funding for most of research in science in the US. Seems like not a great area to achieve huge reduction in deficit.
2- Even if we ignore the whole point of DEI and say that we need to end support for some of the projects. You do take your time and evaluate projects that needs to take action. You don't stop all the funding and pause critical support for projects and cause huge problems on medium and long term. And it also hurt the reputation of the country and its competitiveness.
3- The current NSF director was actually appointed by the current setting president in his first term.
I fail to see why a scientist won’t be interested in the grant now. Maybe if you’re talking about some areas like social sciences, yes, but for everything else not much seems to have changed.
I have not been paid because my salary is funded by an NSF grant and they've shut down the payment system and cancelled payments. (It is still down.) I'm not in the social sciences, I'm in mathematics.
The instability this has created has me looking to leave academia as quickly as possible; I'm sure others in similar situations are having the same thoughts. This has wreaked havoc on all of academia.
It's all about stability and predictability. Science, like other forms of business, favors an environment without sudden regulatory changes. Sudden changes make the government an unreliable partner incapable of committing to anything beyond the next elections.
If the dominant ideology changes, it should only affect future grants, not current grants. Ideally, grants that have already been submitted or are close to submission should be evaluated according to the old rules. Otherwise a lot of time and effort will go to waste.
Europe is circling the drain, Taiwan is inconsequential and becoming less so by the day, and China does not respects it's citizens, they treat them like cattle. But okay sure, India's opinion is super important, especially as they are profiting off the Ukraine war.
I think it's pretty telling that you listed 3 countries you are absolutely not friendly with, and so whose opinion of America's reputation is not really relevant.
If you couldn't see the anti-China rhetoric was a smoke screen, now it should be pretty obvious, with the US going down a similar road (eg. vetting projects that goes against the government's ideology... which is ironically what most far right politicians say they are against: ideology).
This type of political movement always claims to be against the exact things they’re for. They claim to be against censorship while using their actual influence to do things like forcing TikTok to change their moderation policy. They claim to want to protect children while putting child abusers in positions of power. It gives members of the movement an easy way to deflect criticism and express their feelings of grievance—don’t you know we hate censorship, and anyway it’s you who was censoring us! It’s only fair for you to feel a little of that pain that we feel!
I suspect that projects are always vetted against ideology, because everyone has one and everyone believes that his own is correct. I doubt that one could get NSF funding for a study of racial differences in IQ. I am certain that one could not get it for any ‘research’ based on the idea that the Earth is 7,000 years old. That seems like a really good thing!
I think the news is less that a branch of the executive is complying with executive branch policy, and more that it’s surprising how much of the federal government’s actions are based not in the law and the Constitution, but rather in policy. One man almost sixty years ago creates a policy with a stroke of a pen, and it effectively becomes law; another now removes it with a stroke of a different pen. If the latter is a problem, surely the former was too; if the former was not a problem, then why is the latter?
Speaking of the Constitution, what is the Constitutional basis for this large structure of federal funding for the sciences? Nothing in Article I, Section 8 appears to cover it: the encouragement of science appears to be limited to copyright and patent monopolies.
Speaking of the Constitution, what is the Constitutional basis for this large structure of federal funding for the sciences? Nothing in Article I, Section 8 appears to cover it: the encouragement of science appears to be limited to copyright and patent monopolies.
The Constitution is a collection of statements and they collectively have implications. All of Euclidean geometry is based off of 5 statements. That the Constitution doesn’t explicitly say you can have a Department of the Air Force does not imply having one is unconstitutional.
Many Christians believe in the holy trinity despite that phrase appearing nowhere in the Bible.
> Speaking of the Constitution, what is the Constitutional basis for this large structure of federal funding for the sciences? Nothing in Article I, Section 8 appears to cover it: the encouragement of science appears to be limited to copyright and patent monopolies.
This is like saying I read the first sentence of the wikipedia article and it doesn't mention something so it must not exist.
Congress authorized it in 1950; it's extremely visible. [1]
> The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is authorized and governed by the "National Science Foundation Act of 1950," as amended, as well as other statutes authorizing NSF activities and making appropriations to the agency.
Yes, 42 U.S.C. 1861, et seq is the legal basis for the NSF. What’s the Constitutional basis for that law? The Congress only has the powers granted in Article I and further amendments. For example, the Congress does not have the power to regulate rents outside of federal territories. Which enumerated power enables 42 U.S.C 1861?
The Tenth Amendment clearly states, ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ If the Constitution does not grant a power to the Congress, it does not have it and it has no more legislative authority in that regard than you or I do.
It's a reading of constitutional law that insists that the only thing that matters is what they can shallowly read in their pocket constitution, while totally ignoring most of the constitution itself and any of the surrounding court precedent. :)
Eadmund incorrectly notes "The Congress only has the powers granted in Article I and further amendments", and cites the tenth amendment while asking "What’s the Constitutional basis for that law?"
Duh, the appointments clause in conjunction with the necessary and proper clause. :3
> Article I bestows on Congress certain specified, or enumerated, powers. The Court has recognized that these powers are supplemented by the Necessary and Proper Clause, which provides Congress with "broad power to enact laws that are ‘convenient, or useful’ or ‘conducive’ to [the] beneficial exercise" of its more specific authorities. The Supreme Court has observed that the Necessary and Proper Clause authorizes Congress to establish federal offices. Congress accordingly enjoys broad authority to create government offices to carry out various statutory functions and directives. The legislature may establish government offices not expressly mentioned in the Constitution in order to carry out its enumerated powers.
Yes, and then Article I, Section 8 goes on to explain what counts as the ‘common Defence and general Welfare’ when it enumerates the Congress’s powers.
That’s not Sovereign Citizen nonsense — it’s very basic constitutional law. Congress doesn’t have the ability to pass national rent control, for example.
The Supreme Court has decided what ‘the general welfare’ means, and it is not limited to the listed powers. This information is not difficult to find, as would be expected given the last 90ish years of spending that is obviously not limited to the list of powers.
Uh, Congress absolutely does how the power to charge money outside of federal territories [1] and it's a long standing complaint of ex-pats that they have to pay federal taxes.
Section 7 [2] lets them write laws as well as Section 8 [4] . Section 8 aslo lets them pay for it [3].
> Congress absolutely does how the power to charge money outside of federal territories
Of course it does. It has no power to regulate rents outside of federal territories, which is what I wrote. It cannot pass national rent control, for example.
> Section 7 lets them write laws as well as Section 8
Section 7 describes how bills are passed; Section 8 describes what those bills may do. Congress has no Constitutional power to require that every home in the United States have yellow shutters. I feel like this should be uncontroversial! I’m genuinely surprised anyone thinks otherwise.
“While, therefore, the power to tax is not unlimited, its confines are set in the clause which confers it, and not in those of section 8 which bestow and define the legislative powers of the Congress. It results that the power of Congress to authorize expenditure of public moneys for public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution.“
Oh boy, wait until you read [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn], where the Supreme Court ruled that growing food for your own use, on your own land falls within the boundaries of the interstate commerce clause, and hence can be regulated by the Federal gov’t.
This should make it clear. There is no such thing as being for or against ideology. If you exist, there are things you weakly believe in, and things you strongly believe in. The thing someone else strongly believes in, that we weakly believe in, we call ideology. So it's always been about fighting "their" ideology, not ideology.
Always be skeptical when someone defends only the things they strongly believe in. That goes both ways, for the left and right.
It's easy to be for the conservative ideology when you are in the in-group.
> There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.
> There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.
> There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
> There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
> There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.
Before the rise of Trump I might have agreed with you but now I think it's true for trumpers. Look at Musk, Mr. Free Speech until he doesn't like it. The quote above describes him exactly.
On what basis do you declare Elon Musk "conservative"? (No less, the one man whose actions define conservatism!) Are you perhaps confusing conservatism with "current support of a Republican politician"?
I agree with you regarding Musk's hypocrisy around free speech.
Oh, and if you're looking for someone who believes the law protects him but does not bind him, you might like to read the news on the current (Democratic) mayor of Chicago.
I don't understand why you are calling it a religion.
What has been your personal experience with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in employment?
Mine has been that I watched a few videos that basically said: don't hit on people at work, don't mock people for disabilities, and don't treat people as lesser based on physical attributes.
In other words, don't be an asshole to people at work.
The only people I've seen given preferential treatment at work have been those who suck up to the leadership to get promoted.
I've seen it implemented in a couple of ways. One of the simplest is stronger blinding of applications so you aren't biased by irrelevant personal information.
For example this has been pretty effective in astronomy (proposals to get time on competitive instruments) where applications with female names were less likely to be approved. Simply removing the name was enough to improve the situation.
The fallacy is that people think DEI encourages preferential or token "diversity hires". When implemented correctly, it should mean that successful applications (for jobs, grants, whatever) go to the most qualified or deserving candidate using unbiased/impersonal metrics. That may mean encouraging minority groups to apply, but at the time of review, you should have no idea who the applicant is.
> The fallacy is that people think DEI encourages preferential or token "diversity hires".
Why do you say it is a fallacy when the E in DEI stands for the so called equity, which means exactly that. You seem to be describing equality, which is something that DEI was intended to supersede.
When you look at pre-Trump guidelines for FAA job applications, for example, there is an explicitly described preferential process for hiring from the favored groups.
It didn't matter if he was wrong or right, his mistake was entertaining the notion that people would entertain an earnest (if misguided) discussion when in fact that whole topic was taboo.
Questioning the status quo is very different from drawing conclusions the way he did. It should never be taboo to question whether DEI practices are fulfilling their goals or harming other metrics.
The topic is not "taboo". In an organization where compensation is based on non-anonymous peer review, you cannot have a person going around with their thesis that women are objectively inferior engineers. That person has to be fired (directly into the sun, when practical).
He posited that women might be less inclined towards programming due to inherent traits, such as being more people-oriented, suggesting that biological and psychological differences between men and women might explain the underrepresentation of women in tech.
So, maybe, not less intelligent, but, maybe, a poorer fit for a software engineer position than a person less "people oriented" and, therefore, that a lot of the women working as software engineers at Google were hired over more fitting men, because they were women.
I have written what you would likely call "DEI" statements for grants and job applications, and I have reviewed them as well.
The absolutely worst statements are the people who believe that the statement is an ideological litmus test. It never was, and it isn't.
These statements, to a one, are basic HR stuff: discuss your strategies and experiences to not be an asshole and ensure that the diverse people you manage (and they almost certainly are diverse) will be able to get along and work effectively under your management. Boring stuff.
People think its some sort of ideological purity test, write it as such, and get surprised when the statement is evaluated poorly.
The requests are worded in a way that makes people think they're ideological because (as far as I can tell) the people who added it to the requirements were heavily influenced by their ideological commitments. The statements are then reviewed by volunteers taken from the broader community, who aren't going to rate "contributions to diversity" too highly if they're described with an extreme degree of force.
If the people writing the calls wanted the same things as the people reviewing the submissions, they would say, "tell us about your experiences with normal HR tasks."
In almost every case I've seen, the statements are in fact worded in terms of specific contributions. The most general terminology I've seen is requesting the candidate to explain their role "advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion"—to which the best statements respond with (1) their experiences with diverse classrooms/staff, and (2) their specific strategies for approaching these issues.
I have not really encountered instructions that I would misconstrue to be an ideological litmus test, and the majority of submissions that I have reviewed do not in fact talk about the candidate's ideological priors.
Calling it diversity is a huge ideological presupposition. Two white guys can create a hostile work environment for a third, there's nothing diversity specific about it. This is reflected in the way everyone thinks about it - you're not checking to see whether the experiences they're describing crossed the right identity boundaries, you're judging it according to the wrongs dealt and the submitter's sense of balance.
Institutions tend to define diversity broadly, including diversity in terms of race, nationality, gender, socioeconomic status, and so on. I don't talk much about race or gender in my own statements, instead focusing on first-generation students and socio-economic status. This seems not to have hurt me.
I get that the way people think about these statements is different than the way they actually are; I just think people are wrong and that their impression is informed by social media. If it helps, I would be happy to rebrand "DEI Statement" to "Don't be an asshole and also try to keep the peace with everyone Statement".
I think we agree although there's a slight miscommunication, you're not actually including socioeconomic status in your rephrased statement. Like we would both say, if there were three identical twins and two of them were picking on the other, that would merit the exact same intervention as if they weren't identical twins.
So you defend it on the grounds, specifically, correct me if I am misinterpreting, that it is nothong beyond a rebranding of typical HR legal speak? You either think it is important and meaningful or you don't-- ie it is a litmus test. I think it is useful as such frankly, but could be minimized. I am totally happy to pledge allegiance to non-racism or something like that. Some arcane limus test where only people like you can evaluate the true merit of a DEI statement is likely to be unfair, widely abused and ironically probably reinforces institutional racism more than it ameliotates it. Not calling you a hard racist, just saying you are contributing to it and sustaining it rather than reducing it.
I defend it on the grounds that it is basic human management. The scientific workforce is diverse, and this diversity introduces potential conflicts. Money spent on researchers who cannot effectively keep the peace among their students and staff—whether through negligence, naiveté, or outright malice—is likely to go to waste. It is not entirely a re-tooling of HR legal speak, but rather an extension given what we know about how to manage a diverse workforce.
The rubric I use to judge diversity statements, and which is often formalized in rubrics, is: "has the applicant thought about this at all to the point that they have specific experiences and strategies that lead us to trust that they could effectively manage a diverse population of students and staff".
There is nothing arcane about this. To the extent that diversity statements even factor in review, this is the same criteria that everyone I know follows.
In my own applications, I, as a white guy, have been very successful in getting jobs and funding. This is despite never making ideological commitments and barely talking about gender or race, and instead focusing on first-generation students. Just showing that I have put in a minimal amount of thought into working with diverse students and colleagues seems to be enough.
Nobody says they are against ideology. Everyone is pro-their own ideology and anti-everyone else's.
Additionally, I don't think there was an anti-China "smokescreen" used here. Anti-DEI was a central pillar of the Trump campaign, so this purge seems to be fully in line with what was stated explicitly for months in 2024.
> vetting projects that goes against the government's ideology
The tax payer should not be funding ideological projects. For example there shouldn't be a DEI astronaut requirement, in the same way there shouldn't be a religious or gun carrying requirement for astronauts.
In the UK I had a grant application denied based only on DEI, despite the grant being accepted as high value to the tax payer and likely to be successful.
So, back to the old "white guys only" astronaut hiring policy of the moon landings era? And that wasn't a merit policy, that was an explicitly discriminatory policy against women long after the Soviet Union sent Valentina Tereshkova into space.
(at time of writing, she is still alive and the only woman ever to have had a solo spaceflight!)
> In the UK I had a grant application denied based only on DEI
Calling BS on this, they're not going to simply state "DEI" as a reason.
> So, back to the old "white guys only" astronaut hiring policy of the moon landings era?
We should want the best astronauts, not the most diverse. It's the same as wanting the best doctor, or the best pilot.
The UK team for Olympic 100m is majority non-white. I have no doubt that these are amongst the fastest people in the world. Based on DEI standards, should we pick people who are shown slower just to make a more colourful team?
> Calling BS on this, they're not going to simply state "DEI" as a reason.
You can call BS all you like, the application literally stated it so. The threshold for funding was met, but was rejected on the basis.
> We should want the best astronauts, not the most diverse
Considering color or religion doesn't have any impact on the ability of someone to be a "best astronaut", if your groups isn't diverse, it's most likely there is a bias in action.
No, that isn't true at all. Employers can only hire from the pool that exists. If the applicant pool is 90% white dudes, then an unbiased hiring process will result in a very skewed employee demographic. Assuming bias based on differences in statistics is motivated reasoning and should not be entertained.
Funny you'd use "best actor" as an example. What makes the best actor? For a long time there were no leading Asian male actors for example, is that because Asians can't act or because of cultural bias?
Just because something is Science, does not make it above being ideological. There is tonnes of evidence for this collected [0]:
> The trio set out with the intent to expose problems in what they called "grievance studies", referring to academic areas where they claim "a culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed ... and put social grievances ahead of objective truth".
They proved their point. When only papers of a certain conclusion are accepted which further an ideological belief, Science is dead.
People may say that, although it isn't exactly hard to differentiate them. All scientific propositions/hypotheses/findings are "is" statements. Ideologies are made up of "ought" statements. There is no Venn diagram overlap
This is wrong, and based on a (largely deliberate) misunderstanding of what DEI is. DEI is not a push to have quotas. Rather it is based on the assumption that if you see one group being overrepresented then there is probably a bias in favor of that group.
If you look at CEOs you will see that white men are very overrepresented. I (as a white man) don't for a moment believe that that is because white men are better at being CEOs (achieve better outcomes). Rather I believe it is because the selection process has long been biased in favor of white men (both in the last steps, and the path to get there). And this is not just my biases at play, many studies have been done, and none show that white men generically achieve better outcomes.
So DEI is the idea that we need to make the selection process better account for people's biases (largely unconscious) that have been driving this outcome (white men preferentially being selected). It is not about quotas or giving people points for being a woman/black person/disabled/etc. It is all about making sure that those characteristics do not subtract points.
And I have used white men as an example here, as that has been where the largest biases have been (both white, and men), and also because I am currently a beneficiary of those biases, making it hard to argue that I am only arguing this to get an advantage for myself. But you could just as easily point to the current over-representation of women in colleges and universities and worry about an anti-man bias there.
If this were the case then they would be replacing the ideological conformity sections with different ideological conformity requirements. Instead they are simply stripping ideological requirements, period.
Whatever a scientist happens to believe in, these changes would not imperil his ability to receive government funding. But in the previous system, if one felt that unconditional merit was the most fundamental factor in science (and refused to simply lie) he would have been found it much more difficult to secure funding.
> Instead they are simply stripping ideological requirements, period
This is not true. If I submit a project to study the large-scale effect of DEI policies in institutions, that will get rejected because "anti-DEI" is in the current government's idelogy, as written down in presidential orders.
They are not simply removing the previous ideology and leaving a void in place. There are no voids in power structures.
> Instead they are simply stripping ideological requirements, period.
It does not sound like that. At least, not at the NSF, which is freezing funds until it's had an ideologically-driven purge.
The Office of Science seems to have a better approach, removing the need for the previous administration's PIER plan and ignoring any already submitted
> Instead they are simply stripping ideological requirements, period.
That is literally the opposite of what the linked article claims. They aren't "stripping requirements" placed on funding, they're stripping the actual funds from existing grants, based on new requirements that just happen to be phrased along the lines of the ruling regime's political rhetoric.
Your Orwellian version only makes sense if you assume a priori that the funds were granted incorrectly, which again is sort of the opposite of what science is.
>Instead they are simply stripping ideological requirements, period.
This is the significant part.
Woke ideology was always unpopular when put to the test in the court of public opinion and sometimes even law. Whether it's entertainment products that got reviewbombed for incorporating "diversity", illegal hiring/enrollment quotas that once existed to enforce "inclusion", or the replacing of the word "equality" with "equity" because people started catching on that what was touted as equality actually wasn't.
Now that we have a President (and by extension a party) who was elected to get rid of all that, promises to do so are being kept.
As a Japanese-American, I 300% voted for and support this. Everyone should be judged on merit and merit alone, not whether they have the right skin color, sex organs/preferences, disabilities, or illnesses.
Im sure guys that think foreigners are dog eating criminals judge everyone based on merit now.
We have a doctor with asian sounding name and people at work were wondering if they need translator when they visit.
The problem with this idea is that "woke" is a moving target that its enemies are defining. Will they change the definition to include things you don't want? Moreover, does it currently actually have the goal to make meritocracy? For example, they've allowed discrimination based on race in government hiring, for example, so that does not bode well for the idea of being judged on merit alone. Explicitly, they are now allowed to judge on race where they were not before. Read through project 2025 - is that what you actually want, because that's what he's gonna implement.
>For example, they've allowed discrimination based on race in government hiring ... Read through project 2025
I advise you read through the actual Executive Orders than some false propaganda material of at best questionable value.
What Trump is mandating with his EOs are a move back to judging people strictly by their merit, by their character. We are once again on the path to making Martin Luther King's dream a reality.
Here are the EOs with regards to the subject matter at hand:
>Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great.
>Federal employment practices, including Federal employee performance reviews, shall reward individual initiative, skills, performance, and hard work and shall not under any circumstances consider DEI or DEIA factors, goals, policies, mandates, or requirements.
----
>This Federal Hiring Plan shall: ... prevent the hiring of individuals based on their race, sex, or religion, and prevent the hiring of individuals who are unwilling to defend the Constitution or to faithfully serve the Executive Branch;
MLK explicitly supported reparations for black people. He did not support a system of institutional colorblindness. You can only get this from his writing if you take one famous line from one famous speech and ignore the rest of what he wrote.
> What Trump is mandating with his EOs are a move back to judging people strictly by their merit, by their character. We are once again on the path to making Martin Luther King's dream a reality.
Trump has outright been banning transgender individuals from enlisting in the military and serving. Presumably in a merit-based society you would judge them on the basis of merit, not on a secondary characteristic.
> It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that people who are internally confused about themselves and require/demand extensive specialized medical treatments and care are most likely not suited to serve in the military.
Trans people I know are very sure about themselves. More than some cis people in fact. I will let RAND Corporation rebut the rest of your speculation.[1]
The effect on force readiness is an important consideration in any military
policy change. Many types of medical treatments can lead to lost labor and leave
personnel temporarily unable to deploy. Given the small estimated number of
transgender personnel and the even smaller number who would seek gender
transition–related treatment in a given year, the study found that the readiness
impact of transition-related treatment would lead to a loss of less than
0.0015 percent of total available labor-years in the active component. Even
using the highest estimates, less than 0.1 percent of the force would seek gender
transition–related treatment that would affect their ability to deploy. As a point
of comparison, in the Army alone, approximately 50,000 active-component
personnel were ineligible to deploy in 2015 for various legal, medical, or
administrative reasons—a number amounting to around 14 percent of the
active component.
A key concern in allowing transgender personnel to serve openly is how this
may affect unit cohesion. The underlying assumption is that if service members
discover that a member of their unit is transgender, this could inhibit bonding
within the unit, which, in turn, would reduce operational readiness. Similar
concerns were raised in debates over whether to allow gay and lesbian personnel to
serve openly, as well as over whether to allow women to serve in ground combat
positions. However, evidence from foreign militaries and the U.S. military has
indicated no significant impact on unit cohesion or operational readiness as a
result of allowing transgender and gay and lesbian personnel to serve openly or
allowing women to serve in ground combat positions.
There's a more sensible middle-ground here, in that the military should have no problem enlisting people with gender identity beliefs - just as it's fine for military personnel to hold varying religious beliefs - but that no-one else should be obliged to accept these beliefs as true, and that the military should not have to fund any cosmetic procedures to make an individual appear to be of the opposite sex. While also not discriminating against anyone for having these beliefs.
This is a sensible middle-ground approach for the rest of society too. Just treat it like a minority religious belief, then the issue is solved fairly without stepping on anyone's rights.
If both Republicans and Democrats agreed to this approach and put this issue to bed, they could get on with wrangling over much more important problems of governance.
> should not have to fund any cosmetic procedures to make an individual appear to be of the opposite sex
Why is this a talking point? Gender affirming surgeries are extremely rare. Very few trans people go through with them. And even when they do, recovery times are in the order of days or weeks which has little to no impact on the efficacy of the fighting force.
The main things trans people want are:
1. That people treat them with basic human dignity and respect.
2. Access to gender affirming medications. It ultimately doesn't really matter who pays for them because they cost nothing. They are quite literally some of the cheapest medications on the market. Estradiol without insurance costs like 10-20USD for a 3 month supply. Testosterone about the same or less. Androgen blockers cost like 1-5USD for a 3 month supply. You could not find cheaper medications and most pharmacies won't even run insurance for them because they are so cheap. The reason the military "needs" to pay for them is because they need to run the medication through their logistics network so that it is accessible where it is needed.
The cost is irrelevant. What matters is that the medication can get delivered to ships and bases in a timely manner. And that is why the military pays for it.
Why should cosmetic interventions, whether pharmaceutical or surgical, to give an individual the appearance of secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex, be something the military should have any interest in doing? It doesn't help its mission does it.
We allow people to self-identify their religious beliefs. The government doesn't declare you to be a Catholic or a Buddhist and force your driver's license to say such.
Unless you're proposing making the military- and the rest of society- radically gender neutral, than as soon as a person interacts with a driver's license, passport, social media account, or bathroom, they will have to adopt a gender identity . Why should a third party's "gender beliefs" about a person be elevated above their own?
(I also can't see a justification for denying hormone replacement therapy treatment- it's cheap and ridiculously beneficial for mental health. But, for the same reasons, I advocate its availability over-the-counter.)
The architectural solution to gender neutral bathrooms is floor to ceiling panels and doors that actually close. It's quite simple and extremely common in newer buildings in Europe.
Driver's license and passport record sex, and bathrooms and other spaces that are separated for women and men are done so on the basis of sex.
Being an objective measurement of material biological state, sex isn't the same type of thing as a gender identity belief, which is indeed self-declared like a religion is.
>Everyone should be judged on merit and merit alone, not whether they have the right skin color, sex organs/preferences, disabilities, or illnesses.
But now you are taking your preconceived notion of what every trans person must think and disqualifying the entire group from the military before they have an opportunity to prove whether or not they meet the requirements.
>What Trump is mandating with his EOs are a move back to judging people strictly by their merit, by their character.
Conservatives are OK with rolling everything back and hiding behind words, since right now, most people at the highest levels of power - that do the judging - are white men.
How else do you explain such "merit" based nominations like Hegseth for SecDef, Gaetz for Attorney General, etc. (Gaetz withdrew but getting nominated at all was ridiculous). And if Hegseth is qualified to lead the DoD, then so is anybody who ever served in the military at the rank of Major or higher.
I've been called several dozen kinds of labels to try and get me to be a nice and cooperative victim. I've also found myself labeled as the oppressor, as Asians are(were) often found too successful unlike other minorities.
Sincerely screw all that racist noise with extreme prejudice. In this regard, the Left did more work than anyone to get me to vote Trump.
This seems great. It's increasingly apparent that the government was spending countless billions of dollars to push ideology in plainly weird ways. Why should somebody researching e.g. fusion for the Department of Energy also need to create a Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) plan, to even apply?
This should greatly reduce the overall bureaucratic nonsense in science and help get back to science simply being science without imposing ideological conformity tests.
> Why should somebody researching e.g. fusion for the Department of Energy also need to create a Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) plan, to even apply?
To try to ensure that the people working on the project are selected fairly and on merit, rather than unfairly and on personal prejudice.
You can read about PIER plan requirements here. [1] Archive since the page is already dead. Things are moving ridiculously fast for government to the point I suspect there was alot of desire to get rid of all this stuff before, but people were unable to do so.
Anyhow it had nothing to do with the merit of the project or the team which were obviously already being evaluated. It was nothing but an unrelated ideological conformity test added as a requirement.
> Anyhow it had nothing to do with the merit of the project or the team which were obviously already being evaluated
Oh thats an interesting point to make. Were you part of these things? I really like unbiased merit based societies, so I was wondering what your experience was.
Just thought I would recommend some reading about this: "The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?" by Michael Sandel.
Basically, think about what the longer-term, overarching effects on society would be in a perfectly-meritocratic society. It likely wouldn't be all unicorns and rainbows.
Merit is somewhat paradoxically only partially about ability. If it turns out the most testably intelligent person chooses to spend his life flipping burgers and smoking weed then he has no more merit than the most testably dumb person who chose similarly.
In other words a perfect meritocracy isn't Gattaca. It's just a place where your rise isn't going to be directly constrained by things outside of your control, like in Gattaca - being directly rejected because of one's DNA.
In a meritocracy a fool who finds and excels at a niche can thrive, while a genius who doesn't exert himself can languish.
> Things are moving ridiculously fast for government to the point I suspect there was alot of desire to get rid of all this stuff before, but people were unable to do so.
Assuming "was alot of desire" is meant as "widespread support," not just "the President really desired it," that is an absolutely ridiculous interpretation. Fast does not mean strong consensus.
The government has also moved _ridiculously fast_ to
- pardon/commute the vast majority of J6 defendants including those convicted of violence towards law enforcement
- freeze federal aid across the board
- blame the recent aviation crash on DEI
- rename the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America
- revoke birthright citizenship
Does that mean that there "was alot of desire" to do those things? Absolutely not. It just means that those are things that the President has done unilaterally via executive orders or press release.
To be clear I'm not advocating for or against the govt.
But the idea that the government moving "ridiculously fast" is because there "was alot of desire" is a massive stretch. They are moving fast because they are steamrolling everyone in their path (allies included), and in their desire to "get shit done" they are implementing changes that are riddled with errors, and in some cases, even flat out illegal.
Great resource. imo Trump is jerking the wheel too hard in the other direction but some of this stuff was legitimately crazy. FAQ:
Q: I am only requesting support for one graduate student; do I still need to submit a PIER Plan?
A: Yes, all applications for funding to the Office of Science, with the exception of supplemental proposals, conference proposals, and proposals to the SBIR/STTR Programs (at this time), require a PIER Plan. All applicants are encouraged to consider what contributions they can make to creating more equitable and inclusive research environments. It is expected that the complexity and detail of a PIER Plan for a smaller research project and fewer project personnel would be less than that for a larger research project. [and no we won't provide you an example, it needs to be from your heart]
When you're requiring the greengrocer to submit a personalized statement justifying how each single apple he sells contributes to the project of worldwide socialism you might be risking provoking a reactionary counterrevolution. Americans need to just chill with trying to enforce micromanaged ideological conformity on a continent-sized country of 350 million people. And avoid winding up in a place "eroded by the ideological rituals that the entire power structure depend on, 'that are ever less credible, exactly because they are untested by public discussion and controversy'".
I applied for and won a small NASA ROSES citizen science seed funding grant ($80K). The call focused on outreach and equity in a way that encouraged me come up with a plan to get underprivileged high school students involved. This improved my results and made a difference in their lives.
The pendulum went from "DEI totally just means learning about slavery in school, everything else you're noticing is just in your head" to "everything bad is caused by DEI". I hope once this runs its course we can find a middleground between the extremes.
I'm sorry, but this hope needs to be put to rest. This political reality has been under construction since Watergate.
The winner take all, take no prisoners approach worked. Its counteracted evolution, climate science, even reality. Creating your own media outlet, ditching bi-partishanship, has only helped the Republicans.
People here are talking about how MAGA is not the conservative voter. This is a distinction without a purpose, because Maga and the Tea Party movements won elections.
The left and dems must and will follow suit.
You will only see more extreme points, and frankly outright violence. This is only the first 11 days. The impacts of removing fact checkers and the new free speech moderation stance is going to result in a direct uptick of hate speech.
As things get worse, theres going to be even more incitement with utterly fabricated content. This is going to only further entrench the dominance of the media powerhouse that exists.
The greater the animosity, the easier people are going to respond to the perceived threats - and since being disconnected from reality works, it will not matter if its true or not.
Hmm. Dunno, I can't really answer that without sounding like I am tooting my own horn.
Would it help further if I said that my day job is about disinfo/ fraudulent content, and that I make these statements based on work experience?
I could add that I've made these calls, since 2008, and they've been predictable.
Thing is, any rando online can claim these things, so I don't know how to answer your comment.
So what would you look for to differentiate between prediction and simulation?
You are interpreting this through a really uncharitable lens. That statement is not about ideology, the whole premise is stewardship of taxpayer funds.
If a grad student is funded on the project but gets pushed out because of toxic culture, discrimination, or some other kind of marginalization, then that is a waste of research funds and slows down research. Successful teams need to be able to work together effectively and mitigate conflicts. People are diverse, and conflicts are likely to arise because of this: anyone running a research team needs a plan to manage their team, just as they need a plan to manage their data. Its boring HR stuff that is necessary in a diverse society.
Ah yes asking people to consider how they can be inclusive. Such unabashed hate for merit. Literally 1984. Definitely deserves all the vitriole and backlash we're seeing. /s
> Things are moving ridiculously fast for government to the point I suspect there was alot of desire to get rid of all this stuff before, but people were unable to do so.
No, Trump brought in a bunch of veterans of Elon’s takeover of Twitter to do the same thing to the federal government. The people at the top have been replaced, and the new agency leaders are focusing on implementing this anti-DEI agenda at the expense of pretty much everything else right now.
The sense I get from friends who work for the federal government is that this really feels like a hostile takeover. These are not changes that people welcome but have been too scared to ask for.
Here's a take that I came across which I'd like your views on if possible:
When the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act were created, people asked the government to enforces these acts. Whatever you think of merits of DEI, the government decided to create DEI in order to enforce the Civil Rights Act and Americans with Disabilities act.
The problem is because they decided that DEI would be the mechanism to do this with, once DEI is rescinded the question is: If you're not going to enforce the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act through DEI, which mechanism do you plan to use to enforce them? According to this take, once DEI is rescinded there is no mechanism to enforce the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act anymore.
I'm pretty sure that most leftwing and rightwing people will agree that out of 3 millions government workers it's not entirely unlikely that there would be some some valid cases of discrimination against minorities and those with disabilities. The claim is that, whether DEI sucks or not, there is no avenue to contest racism and discrimination in government hiring anymore.
The Civil Rights Act and related topics are part of the US Code (laws) [1] and are completely unrelated to DEI. The legal redresses available for discrimination have not changed whatsoever.
The Civil Rights Act is exclusively about equality of opportunity and requires affected employers hire without regard to race, religion, and other protected classes. So for instance universities using racial quotas was deemed unlawful precisely because of the Civil Rights Act.
DEI stuff was in a very different spirit that really ran against the ideals of the Civil Rights Act. For instance it compelled affected organizations to specifically endeavour to hire based on the race and other characteristics of applicants. It's not entirely clear to me why it wasn't tossed immediately as being in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
DEI is a way to avoid disparate impact liability. Such laws / precedent is derived from the Civil Rights Act (VII). So it is quite the opposite. It also means that disparate impact liability will return without DEI / race quotas so unless the new administration also gets rid of disparate impact and the civil rights act this whole thing will end up right back where it started.
> Whatever you think of merits of DEI, the government decided to create DEI in order to enforce the Civil Rights Act and Americans with Disabilities act.
This part is foundational to the rest, and it's straightforwardly untrue. The government agency which most often enforces these two laws is called the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which remains active under the new administration; the new acting chair has given no indication that she intends to stop enforcing the Civil Rights Act or the ADA.
The "Equal Employment Opportunity executive order" predates the EEOC and doesn't affect its responsibilities.
The EEOC doesn't depend on a quorum for routine enforcement actions. As the last article describes, what it can't do without a quorum is make new rules or issue new guidance, but the new administration will most likely reestablish a quorum soon because there's some existing guidance they'd like to revoke.
Really? We're rational here, which is pretty much meant to be the hallmark of techies.
> The whole concept of 'got noticed' runs entirely contrary to the notion of merit, to an absurd degree in tech.
>Your merit is not what you might achieve, but what you do achieve.
Taking it seriously, I can see several situations where these rules do not hold true.
However, that may be me reading in factors you exclude for the purposes of your point.
So let me turn it to you - can you consider circumstances where these statements wouldn't hold true? Or are they absolute in your eyes?
If they are absolute, I would definitely want to understand your defintions, since I can conceive of many obvious cases where these points are violated.
But since they are obvious, I am assuming you haven't overlooked them in the way you envision things.
A PIER plan is not Equal Protection. For the last few years, a PIER plan is explicitly about Un-equal Protection in the service of achieving "equitable" outcomes.
The US Constitution protects the people from excessive acts of government, not the other way around. It says nothing about "enforcement mechanisms" which, should any actually be enacted by the legislature or ordered by the executive, are subject to constitutional challenge by the people before the judiciary (unless rendered moot by a superseding legislative act or executive order).
Our constitutional republic is not merely "just blots of ink on paper" but rather alive and well.
I wonder what could go wrong with constraining federal funding to political ideas the current president personally approves of?
"Great" isn't how anyone will describe it once the second-order consequences land. (There won't be many who like it once the first-order consequences land.)
You may agree with the incoming anti-DEI policies, but don't let that obscure what's happening here.
Previously, federal funding was controlled by congress, and subject to its collective politics, via long-playing out machinations/compromises/horse-trading, etc, and then to the collective politics of the various enforcement bodies.
It now appears that federal funding is generally subject to the personal politics of the current president. That may seem nice for the specific policies you agree with. But... there are likely to be many policies you don't agree with. Especially since there will be a new president after not too long.
Also, since political purity tests have to be subjectively enforced, they are inevitably subverted to corruption. You can pass the test with the right amount of money delivered to the right people in the right way. That's nice for the people receiving the money, but the corruption quickly becomes horrifically inefficient and costly.
The question isn't whether the previous system was perfect -- it wasn't. The question is whether the new system is worse, and how much worse.
I'm pretty surprised how unaware people seem to be about the power/money grab that is happening. People never seem to learn that you have to look at what people do, not what they say.
Funny how they replaced one performative mantra with another, which is just the same as the one they wanted to get rid of: you have to recite the $SYMBOL_OF_FAITH before you can have a job or apply for a grant.
In fairness, that's what all political types do. It's all just quasi-religion all the way down. Anyone who thought any different was fooling themselves. It's unfortunate that it comes at the expense of scientific research, but hey, that's what people voted for.
Everyone in the US is getting exactly the government we deserve. That's the beauty of democracy! You get government that's precisely as good, or as bad, as you deserve. And you deserve government no better, or worse, than what you get.
You do realize that the EO this replaced has almost the exact verbiage about discrimination, right? We should be focusing on what is different between the two instead of being sidetracked by that argument.
Because DEI audience leaned Democrats and everyone here is trying the hide the sun with a transparent glass. This is backfiring in a big way and the only hope is that it sets strict rules to who gets the money (ie: rather than going the other way, where the incumbent disburse the money to his audience).
>Why should somebody researching e.g. fusion for the Department of Energy also need to create a Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) plan, to even apply?
Why?
Because a homogenous culture of researchers is less effective.
Because you are not just doing research on a topic, you are also training the next generation of scientists and field experts.
And the implication that the old boys club of white dudes is intrinsically the best "meritocratic" outcome is ridiculous. The history of science is full of people who had to fight that norm and succeed despite it.
> This should greatly reduce the overall bureaucratic nonsense in science and help get back to science simply being science without imposing ideological conformity tests.
Sure, sure. Except for the part where they're also censoring any science topics deemed "woke", where all funding now has to meet the president's ideological conformity test on subject and staff as well.
Your stereotypes belie a lack of familiarity with researchers. Here [1] are the demographics of PhD researchers.
White individuals are significantly under represented (and even more so in STEM) though it's not for any nefarious reason. Science has traditionally been merit > all. And lots of highly skilled individuals from China, India, and so on are pursuing education and work in the US, which makes the competition for these spots very different than a random sampling of Americans.
You either don't know what you're a talking about or a in bad faith.
The demographic or PhD researchers is, in fact, the problem because the ration of women to men is very high at the beginning of the career but declines as the career progresses and becomes embarrassing at the professorial stage. This is the whole reason why DEI became essential because it aimed at removing those anti-meritocratic barriers that promoted male career at the expenses of females.
I think that researchers from China, India, and so one should also have plans to effectively manage the diverse set of students and staff they are likely to work with while in the U.S.
> Your stereotypes belie a lack of familiarity with researchers
I was referencing what the current Trump administration deems "meritocratic" and seeks to "return" to, their policy changes are in direct response and opposition to the demographics you describe.
> It's increasingly apparent that the government was spending countless billions of dollars to push ideology in plainly weird ways.
Did you miss the last 80 years of anti-communist, pro-capitalist, free-market propaganda? The american government has been the most powerful ideological force in the world for basically all of living memory.
You're definitely right and I also do not agree with that stuff either, but it was mostly done "appropriately" in that it was through avenues, like the State Department or CIA, who have propaganda as part of their mission.
In this case you had things like the Department of Energy requiring Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research plans to even apply for funding.
The two big differences I see is that that is a wholly inappropriate avenue for ideological enforcement, and that it's also exceptionally divisive.
Things are changing in modern times but historically free markets, capitalism, and so on were very widely shared values. The contemporary equality of outcome (versus opportunity) stuff is extremely new and extremely divisive. The government pushing it, and frequently in very inappropriate ways (the military also comes to mind) is just very weird.
> requiring Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research plans
> equality of outcome (versus opportunity) stuff is extremely new and extremely divisive
Equality of outcome, in the sense that we should hire unqualified people for research positions, is thankfully an incredibly rare and frankly insane position that almost nobody holds. Also thankfully, that's not what these required plans were. The requirement was that groups applying for grants have a specific and actionable plan for making sure that equality of opportunity was ensured. In fact, advantaging one group over another, such as with quotas, would directly violate DEI policy[1]. Typically, a plan would reference existing enrollment/acceptance policies of the company/university/department making an application, which are designed to make sure employees/students are not advantaged or disadvantaged by immutable or protected characteristics. Common examples would be:
- Make sure that your hiring panel is diverse to avoid bias towards whatever groups are over-represented at your company already. It's a well-studied phenomena that people are inclined to like others who are similar to themselves. Without any other factors in play (skill is randomly distributed in applicants, all of your employees are free of sexual/racial bias), if your company consists of, say, 80% men and 20% women, and you pick your interviewers totally at random, you will continue to hire more men than women. If you use a 50/50 split on your interview panel then your hiring becomes more meritocratic by virtue of factoring out self-similarity biases.
- Implement structured interviews and standardized qualifications-based hiring, rather than relying on interviewer preference.
- Learning about potential subconscious biases helps people account for them. Incorporating bias training can mitigate (though not eliminate) hiring biases. Of course, as you have no doubt experienced, these training courses tend to be pretty boring and patronizing, but that's true of most employee training, so /shrug.
- Diversifying applicant sourcing. If you only look for applicants via one platform, adding some more that tend to be used by different groups to your sourcing strategy.
You have bought into the oft-repeated lie that DEI is some Harrison Bergeron-esque attempt to cripple institutions. You were probably pointed to one or two extremely poor implementations of such policies that were genuinely unfair. The broader movement, and most implementations of it, are about equality of opportunity. The intentional destruction of public perception of these policies and subsequent removal only guarantees that existing self-perpetuating gaps in opportunity will persist.
You have to be proactive, but the specifics will vary depending on how you do your hiring. That may look like specifically requesting that employees belonging to underrepresented groups volunteer for recruitment, or best-effort selecting each candidate's panel to represent as many groups as possible. You could do quotas for the panelists, but only if participation wasn't important for career progress. To be clear: these quotas would only apply to members of the panel selected from the pool of eligible employees. Hiring quotas are unfair and harmful.
> Equality of outcome, in the sense that we should hire unqualified people for research positions, is thankfully an incredibly rare and frankly insane position that almost nobody holds. Also thankfully, that's not what these required plans were. The requirement was that groups applying for grants have a specific and actionable plan for making sure that equality of opportunity was ensured. In fact, advantaging one group over another, such as with quotas, would directly violate DEI policy[1].
I understand that many people say this, but academics routinely understand government DEI initiatives to be racial quotas. See for example https://archive.is/So06G about the NIH FIRST program. I don't think that DEI is secretly aiming to cripple institutions, but I do think that its advocates genuinely feel racial balancing is a good idea and dissemble about this in contexts where it would be illegal.
Please understand that if this administration had equality of opportunity as a goal it would not scrap and ban these programs, it would go after those abusing them. Make DEI Great Again. But no, the general belief of those opposed to DEI initiatives appears to be that we were a meritocracy already, and the way forward is to cease and stifle anyone that points out this is not the case, and stifle anyone attempts to establish equality of opportunity.
Racist hiring practices are illegal, and should remain so. If Trump has issued an EO to clarify this point, and language to this effect were added to DEI policies, it would be utterly uncontroversial. I would welcome a case being brought against a professor who actively avoided hiring white people under the guise of DEI to really drive home that such behavior is unlawful and unacceptable.
Witches don't exist. The Communist Party USA wanted to violently overthrow democracy and replace it with a dictatorship headed by Stalin, and Communists in the US government who were working towards that goal by committing treason against the US did exist in the 1950's.
So no, it was not a witch hunt. Looking back, the "witch hunt" slur seems like gaslighting. "Communists, what communists? You're paranoid and crazy!". The release of the Venona documents is severely damning to the "witch hunt" accusers and vindicating to McCarthy's goals, if not his tactics.
You're aware that dozens of women were hanged in Salem Massachusetts because people believed they were witches? So you're very glibly implying "witch hunts" are not a thing when not only are they a thing, but people in this country, have died due to them.
> vindicating to McCarthy's goals, if not his tactics.
The question was a litmus test for whether you are a person that subscribes to an orthodox perspective of history or heterodox - it is pointless to argue with someone that does not participate in a shared reality.
It's really contradictory that the party of less regulation are introducing more friction and bureaucracy in scientific research process. But then it's also the party of anti-science so I can see why.
It is counter-contradictor measures. It is against nay-sayer people who research and find out stuff. Being smart will cost you, because it's not the goal. Less research, and lower levels of education equals more people to fall for simplistic solutions and promisses. The definition of truth is being redefined, and open-minded research and education is in the way of that.
It really shouldn't be easy for ideologues to spend other peoples money. There are entire parallel structures in government, academia and now in business not contributing one iota of effort towards whatever the directed goal of their organisations are principally for.
It's not a contradiction: wanting a small state implies both wanting a low burden of regulation on the private sector specifically, and also wanting a great deal of care to be taken with how money is spent by the government. It isn't a general argument for allowing arbitrary levels of public sector fraud or waste, and it feels bad faith to conflate these two things as if one implies the other. Nobody in the history of politics has argued on principle for a state that has high taxes yet doesn't enforce any rules on how the money is spent.
In this case, the administration believes a lot of the work the NSF funds isn't actually scientific. In that they are correct. The replication crisis has been rolling for 15 years now with no real improvements, largely because the people who distribute the money don't care if it gets used for things that are genuinely scientific or if it gets used for things that merely have the surface level appearance of being scientific. The NSF funds vast amounts of pseudo-science that can be trivially identified and people have been talking about these problems for years with no resolution. Apparently, they need some friction and bureaucracy as otherwise they won't do their jobs correctly. In a free market government intervention isn't required to solve this problem because free actors will just stop funding pseudo-scientific work after a while, but the NSF isn't running a free market, and so the problem just never gets solved.
This article focuses on social science but talks a bit about the general problems at the NSF at the end, and although it was written in 2020 thus at the start of the Biden administration the proposals the author makes for fixes are basically what's happening right now:
Nobody actually benefits from the present state of affairs, but you can't ask isolated individuals to sacrifice their careers for the "greater good": the only viable solutions are top-down, which means either the granting agencies or Congress (or, as Scott Alexander has suggested, a Science Czar). You need a power that sits above the system and has its own incentives in order: this approach has already had success with requirements for pre-registration and publication of clinical trials. Right now I believe the most valuable activity in metascience is not replication or open science initiatives but political lobbying
...
An NSF/NIH inquisition that makes sure the published studies match the pre-registration (there's so much """"""""""QRP"""""""""" in this area you wouldn't believe). The SEC has the power to ban people from the financial industry—let's extend that model to academia.21
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It is difficult to convey just how low the standards are. The marginal researcher is a hack and the marginal paper should not exist. There's a general lack of seriousness hanging over everything—if an undergrad cites a retracted paper in an essay, whatever; but if this is your life's work, surely you ought to treat the matter with some care and respect.
Why is the Replication Markets project funded by the Department of Defense? If you look at the NSF's 2019 Performance Highlights, you'll find items such as "Foster a culture of inclusion through change management efforts" (Status: "Achieved") and "Inform applicants whether their proposals have been declined or recommended for funding in a timely manner" (Status: "Not Achieved"). Pusillanimous reports repeat tired clichés about "training", "transparency", and a "culture of openness" while downplaying the scale of the problem and ignoring the incentives. No serious actions have followed from their recommendations.
It's not that they're trying and failing—they appear to be completely oblivious. We're talking about an organization with an 8 billion dollar budget that is responsible for a huge part of social science funding, and they can't manage to inform people that their grant was declined! These are the people we must depend on to fix everything.
How about this move that we're discussing? Getting rid of openly ideological research grants will help the replication rate quite a bit, as that stuff is riddled with basic replication problems, much worse than the median paper. It's just too easy to take some grant money then publish something pseudo-scientific which sounds good to left wing ears, knowing that nobody will double check because they want it to be true.
As an example, a lot of research into "misinformation" is like that. It's not replicable out of the gate because the papers don't describe their procedure for deciding whether a claim is true or false. They just present random lists of things that conservatives tend to believe, assert that none of them are true / they're conspiracy theories, then do a survey and use the results to conclude that conservatives are dumb / Russian bots. That's it, that's the entire field. There's no methodology, no theories, nothing to be refined or refuted. There are thousands of papers like this, it's astonishing to witness.
I've been writing for years on the topic of bad science, and the fact that universities/granting bodies claim to care about science whilst simultaneously funding and celebrating this stuff is why their reputation has gone down the drain. The consequences were absolutely predictable. Nobody can claim they didn't see it coming.
Right now, there's just a grant freeze combined with a review to find the really nakedly partisan DEI stuff. That's nothing. Much more intense stuff is well within the Overton Window of possibilities by this point, like ramped up prosecutions or large scale defunding.
I've been on HN for a decade and worked (tangentially) with the individual you're responding to- I don't think you should take the effort to respond at all. He's made up his mind that the current approach will improve things, and believes he has "data" to support it, but also seems absolutely naive about the intent and effects of the current administration's approaches.
Agreed. I myself was involved in academia close to a decade as well and participated in studies funded by NIH and NSF during Obama, Trump#1 and Biden era. This person has no clue how rigorous and competitive the grant review process is. If appealing to DEI was so successful in getting your study funded, everyone would do it. But it was never the case at least in my experience.
>> For academic scientists, the list of banned activities could include efforts to increase diversity in the scientific workforce, collaborations with foreign scientists, and research on more environmentally friendly technologies.
These are not the "vast amounts of pseudo-science" that your comment refers to.
I have nothing against the ideas suggested in the 2020 blog post that you cite... it's just that is not what is happening because of the executive order.
The executive orders do not address bad science.
So overall, I agree with most ideas in your comment but I do not think it is relevant to the current situation. The administration is not trying to fix bad science.
The evil genius of this move is that it gets everybody arguing about DEI, and we’re letting the continued expansion of absolute executive power centered in the president go unchecked. It’s not even about party; this started with FDR or even earlier, massively expanded under LBJ and again under W and Obama, and now here we are. The president feels no obligation at all to execute what the Congress authorized him to. Instead the limits of power are whatever the president can get away with. We have a constitutional problem where the Congress is unwilling or unable to legislate effectively and the executive gets to make policy unilaterally. This is not the balance of powers from the U.S. constitution. This is something else.
> We have a constitutional problem where the Congress is unwilling or unable to legislate effectively and the executive gets to make policy unilaterally. This is not the balance of powers from the U.S. constitution
The Republican party controls both houses and the presidency, having already stacked the supreme court, so they get to do whatever they want and there is no balance of powers.
Inevitable consequence of a two-party system with first past the post voting.
All Republicans and all Democrats don’t act and think as one. Take any collection of humans, of any size, and their opinions will be spread across a spectrum.
There are, and always will be, some members in either house and of any party that find it’s in their political interest to debate and pull new laws left or right.
This is especially true under FPTP because each member has to answer to an area, and different areas of a country have baked-in differences in their ideal political outcomes and points of view.
Balance of powers has nothing to do with party; it’s about the ability of one branch of government to operate without constraint by the other branches of government. It was instituted in the US by people who were trying to take lessons from history; both recent (the Intolerable Acts) and ancient (Appius Claudius, Octavian, Alexander, the Thirty), and it’s been forgotten by generations who’ve come to take its protections for granted.
Trump has definitely purged the Republican party of its most moderate members, leaving him surrounded by only the most radical of sycophants. Why do you put so much trust into your institutions? Trump has promised that "we won't ever have to vote ever again", he has been made untouchable by the supreme court, and is now passing budgetary laws without congress.
The opposition is powerless, his own party has become an echo chamber for fascist talking points.
This is a naive, context-free misunderstanding of the present moment based on supposedly intuitive truisms. The Republican party is Trump's party and has been for years now. Pretending there is that much variation that matters is ridiculous and can be remedied by reading any piece of news from the last few years.
The US is now a formal democracy, but it doesn't work as one. There is one guy making decisions, the remaining are either too feeble to do anything about or just fine with the status quo. Yes, there are formal avenues for responses, like the judiciary system, but they've been made toothless. The very fact that Trump is back in the WH is proof of this.
FPTP is a superior option to proportional representation. Belgium still lacks a federal government despite voting 5 months before the Americans and being just some 10 million people and we aren't going to get one either before they get their whole cabinet (minister equivalents) confirmed and installed. This is because there are 5 parties trying form a coalition raging from nationalist-separatist to socialist-rebranded-to-progressive across 2 languages. Brussels lacks its regional government too and is even further away from resolving the impasse.
America would be well advised to avoid this. They'd immediately get a language divide between English and Spanish. The alleged "grand coalitions" of the Democrat and Republican parties would crumble. There might be some consensus in the center which might be large enough but then policies would never change regardless of who you vote for, just like in the times before Trump.
> The Republican party controls both houses and the presidency, having already stacked the supreme court, so they get to do whatever they want and there is no balance of powers.
- No, the supreme court is the same size it's always been.
- No, members of congress don't always vote the party line (although this has consistently gotten worse over time)
Stacking here is about the make up of the benchm not size. I don't understand this link, its seems like an obvious point.
Partisanship works in the current political environment. Cutting off your own projects in case the other party follows your lead, has paid off more than bipartisanship. Voting across aisles is strictly controlled.
Trump was voted in precisely because The R base was tired of people talking about identity issues, getting to power, and then doing nothing about it.
Trump is giving people exactly what they were told would solve their problems, for decades.
The balance of powers has been broken, for good reason. It ensures political goals - see Bi-partisanship doesn't pay.
> - No, the supreme court is the same size it's always been.
Stacked in the sense that more members were appointed by one party vs the other (including one by dubious means), and those people apparently are quite partisan.
The point is that the current party in power has had multiple opportunities to reign in the current lawlessness and the current minority party has attempted to do so, to no result.
I think it’s a little early to call the end of the U.S. Constitution. There is a time component to the rule of law that can be frustrating in the moment but has always been true.
The President is free to assert his desires. Other parts of the country are free to push back if they choose. This takes filing lawsuits, lobbying Congress, pursuing prosecutions, etc. all of which take time, money, and effort. Which in turn allows short-term disruption to happen as the legal process plays out. Which again, is frustrating.
Political mood is also more fickle than people usually believe at the beginning of a new administration. FDR, LBJ, W, Obama, and many other presidents passed through a time in which conventional wisdom held that they had changed the game and amassed too much power. In every case we can look back and see that while they each have left a legacy that endures, it’s smaller than expected at the time. The pendulum swung the other way later on.
My own opinion on this is that “don’t tell me what to do” is among the most popular political positions among Americans. So for example, to the extent DEI felt like being told what to do, it became unpopular. But now that anti-DEI is in power, I expect the bloom will come off pretty quickly. In part because of overreach by a new administration overestimating their mandate. (As most new administrations do.)
I don't. This has been a long, gradual erosion of constitutional rights, and now the system has crumbled. It may appear to stand, but it's merely resting on the rubble.
SCOTUS is going to rule with GOP doctrine, regardless of what the constitution says. The GOP may pursue legal avenues for their actions in an attempt to not make it so apparent that the country is now under single party, totalitarian rule. But they don't have to (see: news).
It started with minor constitutional violations, like emoluments, and has ended with blatant ones, such as attacking birthright citizenship.
Somehow "number of EOs" doesn't sound like the right metric to use when determining whether executive power is growing. Surely it's the content that matters.
FDR forced people to give up all their gold assets at a fixed rate, under threat of imprisonment for a decade. He then proceeded to nearly double the declared exhange rate up once the government had confiscated everybody's gold.
All done by executive order. Makes basically all modern EOs look pretty innocuous by comparison.
That said I actually agree and would love to see a sharp reduction in executive power, especially as it comes to using the military. If we're going to go bombing places, that should require a declaration of war from Congress. And 'emergency' powers should not be enabled for decades on end.
Especially when there are EOs for naming post offices and other boring mechanical work of the executive.
It would take some serious effort (and there’d be disagreement) but maybe you could classify “important” government changes and if they were enacted by congress, EO, courts, etc.
Also, that link stops with Obama and that leaves out two whole administrations that would be pretty pertinent data in this discussion. Nearly a decade of data. It looks like Trump's first term had 220 and Biden had 162. It would be interesting to see the data classified the way you described and then broken down by party over time. The actual policymaking via EO by each party over the last 50 years would be more elucidating than the straight numbers for sure.
The number of EOs is a poor measure of the extent of executive power. There are many other ways to concentrate executive power; for example OMB (part of the Executive Office of the President) issues “M-memos” (“M” for “management”) to the heads of all departments, instructing them on how to implement EOs, laws, and White House priorities.
There is a consensus among researchers of the workings of the US government and the legal context thereof that, since FDR and especially since Reagan, that the “imperial presidency” has been gaining ground.
Pretty sure it’s the work of Stephen Miller - who is now his senior policy advisor.
8 years ago the Trump admin had no idea what to do. Now they’re prepared and much more dangerous.
Some things will be reversed in 4 years time and we can ride out the storm. but others - like renewed emphasis on fossil fuels to reward the big donors and have energy for AI - will have lasting effects on my children and their children — those make me truly furious.
Or never. We should be prepared for Term 3 (which is already being floated) or a landslide GOP win in 2026, 2028, and beyond. Expect future Presidential elections to look like '86.
You all are openly admitting that these people are evil geniuses. Keep that in mind when thinking to the future. They are going to continue their evil genius behavior and it's going to keep working.
The word evil is a bit overused, but in the case of Stephen Miller it fits like a glove.
I’ve said since the beginning that that saving grace (if there is one) of Trump’s first term was that he was disorganized, and he surrounded himself with people who kept him in check to some degree. People who were willing to tell him that he couldn’t do certain things (prime example: White House legal counsel kept Trump from doing the crazy things that people like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell suggested after he lost the 2020 election).
He’s not going to make that mistake this time, and he’s putting people in power who will do what he wants without question. That’s the scary part of the next four years.
I mean you just hunker down, stop reading the news, go about your life, and hope that the “storm” doesn’t do too much damage, and then work like hell in 4 years time to avoid a repeat (won’t be Trump but to prevent another fascist president, also you can bet that Trump will try for a 3 rd term on the basis that he didn’t serve 2 consecutive terms).
I think there are some active things you can do to help. Give money to legal groups challenging unconstitutional actions. Write to your various federal reps to let them know how you feel. Be kind and supportive to those being targeted by hate and bigotry.
We won't be riding out this storm if we all hunker down.
The campaign for the next presidential election started the day after the last. The far-right got this and are actively working to discredit any possible competing candidate.
Right now is a great time for Dems to start working hard on taking back both houses. Start mapping districts that can be flipped, districts with low voter registration, and which messages they will bombard these people with.
Conservatives realized that they could effectively lock down Congress, take over the Supreme Court and then vest all power in the executive. The whole arguments against DEI, smaller governments etc are all a smoke screen because they have zero issues with nepotism and favoritism as long as it benefits them. And no issue with government overreach as long as they control it.
Unfortunately I think the only direction is balkanization of the states. And I don't think that is going to end well.
It may be easy to get mad as the Republicans for this, but there’s a clear bipartisan precedent here. Remember DACA? Might have been a good policy if Congress had enacted it. Bad precedent as an executive action though, because it establishes that the president’s ability to make immigration policy is effectively unlimited. Today’s ICE raids are made possible by DACA.
I wouldn't count the Executive Orders related to ICE in the "nepotism and favoritism" group fzeroracer referred to. Those might be more of the "smokescreen." The orders for mass layoffs or encouraging quitting of civil service seen more like the ulterior motive. Allowing the president to remove "disloyal" civil servants would take us back to the spoils system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system
Then, either they use existing executive power to ensure Republicans have an insurmountable advantage in national elections, or they haven't thought things through and we'll see even larger shifts in federal regulations after each administration change.
DACA certainly pushed the limits of executive authority, but...
Immigration raids are pretty clearly an executive function, and they happened prior to DACA and prior to ICE. Executive prioritization of federal law enforcement is normal and expected.
I'm not particularly going to disagree that the Dems are useless or not part of the problem, because they absolutely are. A lot of the issues we have is because of continued attempts at bipartisanship watering down bills into oblivion, means-testing and obsession with locking out people further left.
But ultimately a lot of our core foundational agencies have been functioning well regardless. And it's only the right that's intent on tearing them down no matter the consequences. So while the Dems enable this, the Republicans enact it.
What the Democratic party did to Sanders was a disgrace. The people wanted him, the powers-that-be (donors?) didn't. He'd probably have won against Trump, according to surveys.
The Republicans did go with the (sadly) popular guy. I guess he was palatable (by the definition that matters) because there was no talk of increasing taxes on high incomes.
> What the Democratic party did to Sanders was a disgrace. The people wanted him, the powers-that-be (donors?) didn't.
More people who voted wanted Clinton and Biden. Sanders himself admitted not enough young people voted and his platform was less popular in more conservative states.
Very very minor party shenanigans. Serious enough that they should be called out and punished, but not serious enough to effect the voting.
"She wad given the questions tonthe debate," is the most serious accusation. But anyone with a dozen brain cells knows whats going to be asked during the debates.
Yea, looks like the US is going full on Russian mode here. I'm not all that disappointed in Trump himself, this was no surprise. I'm disappointed at the lack of meaningful opposition. Most of the republican part have fallen in line and the Dems aren't doing much.
Question here for this group. In this day of technology, information is power seems much more relevant. I don't have clear data, but it seems from observation and analysis by others social media played a pretty key role: "fake news", info bubbles, biasing your feeds etc. What are some ideas on reliable ways to provide access to accurate information?
We have pretty fixed red/blue blocks of states and Trump/MAGA has made the gap much wider.
In earlier years I would have been okay living in a red state - not my pref but no big deal. Now I’m no more willing to raise my kids in a deep red state than I am in Russia or China.
I agree with your broader point, but I really wish people wouldn't refer to MAGA Republicans as "conservative." Right-wing, or reactionary, certainly. But there's nothing "conservative" about undermining the rule of law and ignoring the Constitution.
By the same logic, I don't like calling far-left cancel culture "liberal." I'm afraid our partisanship has blinded us to genuine liberal and conservative virtues.
I also wouldn't label cancel culture as "far-left" because just as it isn't in any way "liberal", it isn't limited to those on the proverbial left of the spectrum. The mainstream language used to discuss politics simply lacks the ability to reflect the nuance needed in the 21st century. And that's not even getting into the discussion on what we call "cancel culture" because there is a big gulf between "that person said a thing that was a bit off" and "that person is a literal criminal/fascist" in my opinion.
And thanks to Biden's final decisions, presidents and their entourage are effectively immune to prosecution. They just need to "pardon" their friends at the end of the administration. So there is really no limit to what Trump can do.
Yes, I know it existed. But democrats acted previously as this was a problem. Now they normalized it and both parties cannot complain anymore. The judiciary system was made completely toothless against a president and anyone he dims a friend.
I'm genuinely puzzled by people's reaction to DEI measures. In my experience, they have in many cases been explicitly exclusionary (e.g. a conference only for certain minorities, specific support preferences). I have never heard anyone criticize "outreach" in general. The problem starts when outreach means only targeting specific minorities.
Lots of politically charged comments on this discussion. If you disagree with NSF’s merit and broader impact review criteria, that’s fine and it’s important to have a healthy conversation about it, but I think it’s important to take a step back and thoughtfully address concrete ideas that are actually contained in the proposal review criteria.
These are the kinds of issues at stake in terms of the broader impacts criteria:
- Is it good that NSF promotes applications that include historically minority-serving institutions (as opposed to just the same few R1 universities)?
- should NSF prioritize proposals with strong scientific outreach activities aimed at boosting engagement and opportunities in under-represented demographics?
Keep in mind that NSF funding is extremely competitive. It’s not like subpar research is ubiquitously getting funded over better research with lower “broader impacts” scores. Successful proposals excel on both fronts.
1. There are thousands of universities in the US that are neither R1/R2 nor "historically minority serving". What about those universities?
2. Where did you get the idea that outreach is not still an important priority? The issue is what is euphemistically called "under-represented demographics" which we understand excludes many Americans on the basis of their race.
It is wild to pull already granted money. I meet so many scientists who just need $X to continue pursuing their research and it’s generally not a large sum. So this is incredibly disappointing for the research ecosystem which feeds the startup ecosystem. This hurts our competitiveness on the global stage and decreases our future quality of life.
another great reminder that if the money isn't in an account in your name that you fully control, you shouldn't count on it. have had to learn this the hard way myself.
They need arbitrary criteria on which to assess that money goes to the “right” group of people. Competitive awards already had a lot of arbitrary factors, this is yet another person to add to this, with a uniquely political perspective. Also if they don’t have to award the money it is likely they don’t.
This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an authoritarian regime. Hysterical rhetoric doesn't help anything, it simply inflames tensions and perpetuates the cycle of politicians trying to hurt each other. We should all attempt to avoid it as much as possible.
The whole "loyalty purge" is very much a hallmark of an authoritarian regime, and Congress is just standing by.
Sure, it's not Russia or China, but it's certainly no model democracy. We're definitely heading down the path of authoritarianism / fascism.
Don't forget that 4 years ago there was an armed attempt to overturn the results of an election, spurred on by the losing president who also pressured officials to overturn the results. And then the same politician was given immunity by the justices who he appointed (if it had been any other court they would have been forced to recuse themselves from the case), leading to him being re-elected and then promptly pardoning those who attempted a coup. That's arguably the most anti-democracy event in the history of the US (or at least the last 100 years).
Then when that politician gets in power he starts an loyalty and ideological purge. That's exactly what authoritarian leaders do (and Xi in China did). So yes, we still have checks and balances and our system is not authoritarian, but Trump certainly is and is trying his hardest to centralize as much power and authority as possible in himself, which is again exactly what authoritarian leaders do. Lets call a spade a spade.
Last week we have seen ai CEOs calling for sanctions because the Chinese publish open weights models and research, while the American companies don't. Then this naked politicization of science (which is also done pretty incompetently). This really feels like a paradigm shift.
Not only that.
I've seen that some NSF-funded billion-sized projects are closing DEI channels in slack.
The idiocy of the government is really limitless here.
Just a note, this isn't just about DEI, it's about all things trump doesn't like it looks like. May be even solar power and windmills (that cause cancer, according to him).
I'm confused - was the decision to "shut everything down" made by the Trump admin, or by NSF on their own? If it's the latter, is it actually necessary or are they overreacting on purpose?
I can’t sort of understand an EO stopping grants with “gender ideology” or “woke ideology (whatever that means, still unclear), but “green new deal”?!? So we a halt all research into clean energy or climate change and just hope co2 emissions drop by themselves? Fing idiots who are sacrificing our children’s future for the oil and gas lobbyists. This makes me very angry.
the overton window has a new view. According to the old direction, these subjects are 'not to be discussed in professional society', i.e. they are to be decided by government and are considered intellectually dirty. Under the new rules, anything goes and needs to be publicly debated in order to remove the previous biases.
Curious to see whether HN is also following suit in changing its window, like every other online medium seems to be doing.
I hope not; you can often see rightwing nonsense in threads, and lord knows I argue with them often enough, but it's not reached the Twitter point of total unusability yet and still manages to have interesting discussions sometimes.
I hope we can still hold discussions on "dirty" subjects in a dispassionate and objective way. Sadly, I see a lot of those typical short snarky comments now common in other online spaces.
Also, this IS an important discussion, for it's creating social transformation that might hinder our species' ability to solve the difficult challenges ahead.
It's the first time I'm seeing accessibility put under the same umbrella as DEI. Is "DEIA" in the executive order, or is NSF overreacting, or... is being disabled and wanting to have some quality of life "woke" now?
"DEIA" has picked up steam in government circles over the past few years, and made it into the executive order because of that. I don't think I'd ever seen it used by a non-governmental organization.
Accessibility has always been part of DEI. (Certainly it's been a repeated topic of conversation in my campus's Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board.) And yes, any effort that involves spending time or money to make sure that every person gets to "have some quality of life" falls under this same umbrella. That is literally what people are referring to when they call things "woke".
There is still a difference between actually doing hard work to help disadvantaged and marginalized folks and thinking that “being annoying about one’s pronouns” or “making lists of coworkers who are not woke enough” (both examples are quotes from self-proclaimed social justice activists) solves any problems.
However, thinking that this crop of politicians would take a nuanced stance on anything at all is idiocy at its purest.
Sure! There are always people out there who obsess over linguistic and behavioral purity, and they tend to be very loud. I'm not certain that I've ever met one of them in person. (I've certainly met people who might say (e.g.) "Here's why I've started including pronouns in my email sig," but I think that's not what you're talking about.)
If the current "anti-woke" movement were just about shutting down those obnoxious purists, I think it would be a lot less controversial. But from what I've seen, the political rhetoric (and the associated policy positions now being implemented) strikes just as hard or harder at the folks actually trying to do the hard work.
I was not thinking about immigrating to the US, but this is making me reconsider. EU is circling the drain and the writing is on the wall. The project failed.
I will not miss the “DEI” components of NSF proposals (or the PIER part of the DOE ones), especially having been on the review panel side about 5 times now. It’s not that I disagree with their intent, but the fact that after you’ve read a few you realize that proposers know exactly what they are expected to write there, so they write that there. Those sections are basically a useless going-through-the-motions exercise, and everyone knows it. I’ve never seen a proposal win or lose, or even change positions in a tie break, based on that content. More or less we just look to see that it exists, indicate that existence in the review form, and concentrate on the actual content. It’s a performative waste of everyone’s time.
This is a bit disingenuous: there is no "DEI" component of NSF proposals. There is a Broader Impacts section which is mandated by law - the America Competes Act of 2010, which congress passed. https://www.congress.gov/111/plaws/publ358/PLAW-111publ358.p... It states that:
GOALS.—The Foundation shall apply a Broader Impacts Review Criterion to achieve the following goals: (1) Increased economic competitiveness of the United States. (2) Development of a globally competitive STEM workforce. (3) Increased participation of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM. (4) Increased partnerships between academia and industry. (5) Improved pre-K–12 STEM education and teacher development. (6) Improved undergraduate STEM education. (7) Increased public scientific literacy. (8) Increased national security.
That's it. I've won many NSF proposals and have never talked about DEI. Instead we talk about outreach work we do with local schools, our involving undergraduate students in research who would not otherwise be able to volunteer their time, and of course the economic impacts of working on these topics.
An executive order cannot override the law authorizing the National Science Foundation and its activities. We are, for now, a country of laws.
> I’ve never seen a proposal win or lose, or even change positions in a tie break, based on that content
This is an absolutely wild statement, because my experience has been the complete opposite. I've seen a zillion times where a straight white guy was passed over specifically to achieve DEI goals.
I don't think the pro-DEI crowd understands how discriminatory DEI initiatives became in many institutions and how that's the root of the anti-DEI backlash.
I've lost count of the number of times I've seen the best X (candidate, project, company, whatever) get rejected because they were unacceptably white and male, so that the job/grant/contract could go to a DEI candidate instead.
Heck, I was on an interview committee where the recruiters and hiring manager openly admitted they weren't interviewing male candidates, and we spent 3 months interviewing 100% of female candidates who applied while hundreds of male applicants got ghosted. That one was more explicit than most, but the same phenomenon has been happening for years at every layer of academia, business and government.
The post your are talking about is specifically about NSF proposals. Your experience with interviewing, project choice, contracting or whatever you are referring to is a different thing. It's not so wild to imagine that a different thing has different practices.
I've never found this argument of the anti-DEI crowd to be very convincing, because it inherently implies that without DEI measures, such decisions would be entirely meritocratic.
>I don't think the pro-DEI crowd understands how discriminatory DEI initiatives became in many institutions and how that's the root of the anti-DEI backlash.
Nobody cared as long as the discrimination is happening to white men. That's why people voted for Trump this time.
It's the societal backlash you get when you try to force equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity.
As context, the NSF requires grant writers to include a “broader impacts” section [1] in every grant proposal. This includes things like improving education, national security, economic competitiveness, and also inclusion - for example, ideas to attract more talent from underrepresented groups. So every NSF proposer works hard to satisfy the NSF on this requirement. I happen to think that these are worthwhile goals (we shouldn’t be wasting our limited talent due to historical crankiness) and simultaneously I believe the sections ends up being a bit performative. If the NSF were to change its criteria for grants going forward I might disagree with that approach but it would be consistent with what I’ve heard from these folks, ie they think “DEI” is getting in the way of science. However: the current approach is just destructive: if involves asking researchers to augment their proposals with these goals, and then retroactively refuses to pay already-awarded grant recipients who did what they were asked to.
I will leave the question of whether this is constitutional to other folks. I will even leave aside the question of whether we can afford to defund science in our current crazy geopolitical environment. The real point here is that this is just plain wrong.
[1] https://new.nsf.gov/funding/learn/broader-impacts
I'm a bit confused, or maybe I've been doing it wrong. DEI-related things don't usually go in Broader Impacts, do they? When I've written grants, Broader Impacts was just generally for "how is your research going to help society?"; it was the Broadening Participation in Computing section that was oriented toward DEI.
I think broader impact section is good. Whether it should be weighted as high as it was is up to debate. I personally think it was becoming too important for the success of the proposal.
But obviously the new administration is not interested in any sort of nuanced debate, but rather ideological purge.
I agree that the goals are worthwhile, and also feel that requiring every proposal to include this is not efficient and/or very effective. They should take all the funds and time spent on this every year as part of every award, and just fund programs specifically designed to attract inner-city kids to science, or funnel talented, low-income, high school students to be mentored, taught advanced classes, etc.
I would be happy to spend time mentoring URM, etc. But it'd work a lot better if others managed such a program, thought about how to attract them, etc. Specialization is good.
That seems like a reasonable middle ground to me. But I didn't have any problem with DEI. If you have inner-city kids underrepresented by 50% then fund according to %population * %underrepresnted -- if 25% population then 12.5% of funding for programs to increase participation (don't think it would be that high). Maybe divide that by N if you have N different groups you would like to be more represented (eg rural kids). Performance is just that. Funding would be more effective. I expect anti-DEI folks would like the funding effort even less than the performance effort. It's obvious they believe diversity itself is part of the problem (whether admitted or not).
> they believe diversity itself is part of the problem (whether admitted or not).
they admit it. President Trump stated unambiguously that the recent crash and tragic loss of life is due to DEI hires, even though all the pilots and air traffic controllers involved were able-bodied white (presumably heterosexual and cis-gendered) men.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpvmdm1m7m9o
> Asked by a reporter how he could blame diversity programmes for the crash when the investigation had only just begun, the president responded: "Because I have common sense."
Why is anyone who isn't part of his cult still listening to a word he says?
The man lies when his lips move. There's no value to be gained with actually intellectually engaging on any of this. He didn't reason himself into anything he believes in, it makes no sense to reason about it.
The language he really speaks is that of power - 'I do it because I can', and of propaganda - 'I say this because it benefits me to'.
Don't normalize this nonsense.
I listen because he controls the most powerful army in history and can crush my country's economy if we don't allow his gang of oligarchs to mess with our democracy.
When the US sneezes, the whole world catches a cold.
Sure, you listen in the same way that you listen to the demands of an armed gunman in a store.
But you can't engage with trying to find any sense in it. His administration does not live in the same reality that anyone else does. Repeating the lies only gives them undeserved legitimacy.
Do you have any thoughts (which you feel comfortable sharing) on the actual effectiveness or otherwise of these initiatives? Setting aside the dogma on both sides, do they achieve their stated aims?
It's difficult to isolate the effects of DEI - there are far too many confounding factors interfering. You might use effective masking when analyzing a submission that removes your own personal biases, but, after the hire, there is no way to hide the difference that could have impacted your assessment.
Keeping biases in check is a daily exercise. I am aware of many of my own biases and I have to continuously fight back. There are people whose company I enjoy more than others, but I can't let that interfere with my professional judgment.
I agree that there's not much information to be gathered from a small sample, but there ought to be some tangible effects at the macro level. Is academia actually becoming more equal due to these initiatives? Are researchers who are hired as a result of inclusivity programmes as effective as researchers who are hired outside those programmes? These are things we ought to be able to measure.
Brazil has some long running DEI programs for public colleges and universities and the general conclusion is that minority students who performed worse in admission tests but were enrolled based on quotas show very similar academic performance to the students who came from wealthier backgrounds. Some data hints that they perform better than their non DEI colleagues.
I work for a university. I know that for several undergraduate degree programmes (not by any means all of them, but several) we've measured and there's no evidence of any correlation between the academic achievements in related subjects prior to study and the eventual degree classification.
Since apparently there's no point in testing them for "aptitude" or we don't know how to do so, it makes sense to have other criteria such as broadening participation.
Or, you know, enrol the ones who'd be better on your sports teams, or who look prettier for prospectus photos, or something - just don't fool yourself that you care about some sort of pre-existing "talent".
SAT/ACT scores are the best predictors of undergrad GPA as well as probability to have high income in the future, largely independent on the socio-economic background [1].
[1] https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/S...
Without going into the discussion about polarized points. I have some observations
1- NSF budget is about 10 billions, I always had in mind that it is much more. That's about 0.17% of the total federal budget. If we include DOE R&D funding and NIH we will get to 1%. This is the funding for most of research in science in the US. Seems like not a great area to achieve huge reduction in deficit.
2- Even if we ignore the whole point of DEI and say that we need to end support for some of the projects. You do take your time and evaluate projects that needs to take action. You don't stop all the funding and pause critical support for projects and cause huge problems on medium and long term. And it also hurt the reputation of the country and its competitiveness.
3- The current NSF director was actually appointed by the current setting president in his first term.
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This does not hurt the reputation of the US.
Suppose you are a scientist. Would you be interested in USA grants and universities as career options? Certainly much less than last year.
I fail to see why a scientist won’t be interested in the grant now. Maybe if you’re talking about some areas like social sciences, yes, but for everything else not much seems to have changed.
I have not been paid because my salary is funded by an NSF grant and they've shut down the payment system and cancelled payments. (It is still down.) I'm not in the social sciences, I'm in mathematics.
The instability this has created has me looking to leave academia as quickly as possible; I'm sure others in similar situations are having the same thoughts. This has wreaked havoc on all of academia.
It's all about stability and predictability. Science, like other forms of business, favors an environment without sudden regulatory changes. Sudden changes make the government an unreliable partner incapable of committing to anything beyond the next elections.
If the dominant ideology changes, it should only affect future grants, not current grants. Ideally, grants that have already been submitted or are close to submission should be evaluated according to the old rules. Otherwise a lot of time and effort will go to waste.
I know it's a rhetorical question, but, at this point, I don't even want to visit the US.
The media coverage of it does.
In whose eyes? Iran's? Russia's? China's?
Germany, France, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, India.
China looks at America and shows its citizens what an alternative fate could be, and it works.
Aren't Japan and Taiwan are ethnically homogenous?
> China looks at America and shows its citizens what an alternative fate could be, and it works.
Not really though. Still, around ~10k PhDs from China get green cards.
I am not sure if it can be quantified.
There was a time when the very sentence I wrote would be laughable. That time has long since passed. The change can be noticed.
Europe is circling the drain, Taiwan is inconsequential and becoming less so by the day, and China does not respects it's citizens, they treat them like cattle. But okay sure, India's opinion is super important, especially as they are profiting off the Ukraine war.
> China does not respects it's citizens, they treat them like cattle.
the US is trying to catch up in that race now. see how they treat their women wrt reproductive health.
Iran, Russia, and China must be very optimistic by seeing the US shooting themselves in the foot.
I think it's pretty telling that you listed 3 countries you are absolutely not friendly with, and so whose opinion of America's reputation is not really relevant.
What about your allies?
If you couldn't see the anti-China rhetoric was a smoke screen, now it should be pretty obvious, with the US going down a similar road (eg. vetting projects that goes against the government's ideology... which is ironically what most far right politicians say they are against: ideology).
This type of political movement always claims to be against the exact things they’re for. They claim to be against censorship while using their actual influence to do things like forcing TikTok to change their moderation policy. They claim to want to protect children while putting child abusers in positions of power. It gives members of the movement an easy way to deflect criticism and express their feelings of grievance—don’t you know we hate censorship, and anyway it’s you who was censoring us! It’s only fair for you to feel a little of that pain that we feel!
Zuckerberg coming out strong for free speech, and then sending employees who push back on anti-DEI policy changes to HR...
Free speech if you're a billionaire.
They are against censorship of THEM not censorship of YOU
I suspect that projects are always vetted against ideology, because everyone has one and everyone believes that his own is correct. I doubt that one could get NSF funding for a study of racial differences in IQ. I am certain that one could not get it for any ‘research’ based on the idea that the Earth is 7,000 years old. That seems like a really good thing!
I think the news is less that a branch of the executive is complying with executive branch policy, and more that it’s surprising how much of the federal government’s actions are based not in the law and the Constitution, but rather in policy. One man almost sixty years ago creates a policy with a stroke of a pen, and it effectively becomes law; another now removes it with a stroke of a different pen. If the latter is a problem, surely the former was too; if the former was not a problem, then why is the latter?
Speaking of the Constitution, what is the Constitutional basis for this large structure of federal funding for the sciences? Nothing in Article I, Section 8 appears to cover it: the encouragement of science appears to be limited to copyright and patent monopolies.
Speaking of the Constitution, what is the Constitutional basis for this large structure of federal funding for the sciences? Nothing in Article I, Section 8 appears to cover it: the encouragement of science appears to be limited to copyright and patent monopolies.
The Constitution is a collection of statements and they collectively have implications. All of Euclidean geometry is based off of 5 statements. That the Constitution doesn’t explicitly say you can have a Department of the Air Force does not imply having one is unconstitutional.
Many Christians believe in the holy trinity despite that phrase appearing nowhere in the Bible.
> Speaking of the Constitution, what is the Constitutional basis for this large structure of federal funding for the sciences? Nothing in Article I, Section 8 appears to cover it: the encouragement of science appears to be limited to copyright and patent monopolies.
This is like saying I read the first sentence of the wikipedia article and it doesn't mention something so it must not exist.
Congress authorized it in 1950; it's extremely visible. [1]
> The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is authorized and governed by the "National Science Foundation Act of 1950," as amended, as well as other statutes authorizing NSF activities and making appropriations to the agency.
[1]: https://new.nsf.gov/about/authorizing-legislation
Yes, 42 U.S.C. 1861, et seq is the legal basis for the NSF. What’s the Constitutional basis for that law? The Congress only has the powers granted in Article I and further amendments. For example, the Congress does not have the power to regulate rents outside of federal territories. Which enumerated power enables 42 U.S.C 1861?
The Tenth Amendment clearly states, ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ If the Constitution does not grant a power to the Congress, it does not have it and it has no more legislative authority in that regard than you or I do.
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> You’re verging into SovCit stuff here.
It's a reading of constitutional law that insists that the only thing that matters is what they can shallowly read in their pocket constitution, while totally ignoring most of the constitution itself and any of the surrounding court precedent. :)
Eadmund incorrectly notes "The Congress only has the powers granted in Article I and further amendments", and cites the tenth amendment while asking "What’s the Constitutional basis for that law?"
Duh, the appointments clause in conjunction with the necessary and proper clause. :3
> Article I bestows on Congress certain specified, or enumerated, powers. The Court has recognized that these powers are supplemented by the Necessary and Proper Clause, which provides Congress with "broad power to enact laws that are ‘convenient, or useful’ or ‘conducive’ to [the] beneficial exercise" of its more specific authorities. The Supreme Court has observed that the Necessary and Proper Clause authorizes Congress to establish federal offices. Congress accordingly enjoys broad authority to create government offices to carry out various statutory functions and directives. The legislature may establish government offices not expressly mentioned in the Constitution in order to carry out its enumerated powers.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C2-3...
Yes, and then Article I, Section 8 goes on to explain what counts as the ‘common Defence and general Welfare’ when it enumerates the Congress’s powers.
That’s not Sovereign Citizen nonsense — it’s very basic constitutional law. Congress doesn’t have the ability to pass national rent control, for example.
The Supreme Court has decided what ‘the general welfare’ means, and it is not limited to the listed powers. This information is not difficult to find, as would be expected given the last 90ish years of spending that is obviously not limited to the list of powers.
> Congress doesn’t have the ability to pass national rent control, for example
Rent control should be easy to fit within "general welfare".
Uh, Congress absolutely does how the power to charge money outside of federal territories [1] and it's a long standing complaint of ex-pats that they have to pay federal taxes.
Section 7 [2] lets them write laws as well as Section 8 [4] . Section 8 aslo lets them pay for it [3].
[1]: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/us-c...
[2]: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-1/#ar...
[3]: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-1/#ar...
[4]: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-1/#ar...
> Congress absolutely does how the power to charge money outside of federal territories
Of course it does. It has no power to regulate rents outside of federal territories, which is what I wrote. It cannot pass national rent control, for example.
> Section 7 lets them write laws as well as Section 8
Section 7 describes how bills are passed; Section 8 describes what those bills may do. Congress has no Constitutional power to require that every home in the United States have yellow shutters. I feel like this should be uncontroversial! I’m genuinely surprised anyone thinks otherwise.
“While, therefore, the power to tax is not unlimited, its confines are set in the clause which confers it, and not in those of section 8 which bestow and define the legislative powers of the Congress. It results that the power of Congress to authorize expenditure of public moneys for public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution.“
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...
Oh boy, wait until you read [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn], where the Supreme Court ruled that growing food for your own use, on your own land falls within the boundaries of the interstate commerce clause, and hence can be regulated by the Federal gov’t.
This should make it clear. There is no such thing as being for or against ideology. If you exist, there are things you weakly believe in, and things you strongly believe in. The thing someone else strongly believes in, that we weakly believe in, we call ideology. So it's always been about fighting "their" ideology, not ideology.
Always be skeptical when someone defends only the things they strongly believe in. That goes both ways, for the left and right.
It's easy to be for the conservative ideology when you are in the in-group.
> There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.
> There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.
> There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
> There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
> There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
> > Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
> > There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
But this is completely false. The credulousness with which it gets repeated is telling.
Before the rise of Trump I might have agreed with you but now I think it's true for trumpers. Look at Musk, Mr. Free Speech until he doesn't like it. The quote above describes him exactly.
On what basis do you declare Elon Musk "conservative"? (No less, the one man whose actions define conservatism!) Are you perhaps confusing conservatism with "current support of a Republican politician"?
I agree with you regarding Musk's hypocrisy around free speech.
Oh, and if you're looking for someone who believes the law protects him but does not bind him, you might like to read the news on the current (Democratic) mayor of Chicago.
DEI is just as much an ideology as the current GOP rabid anti-DEI.
> vetting projects that goes against the government's ideology...
This is with the previous administration was also doing. You were required to buy into the DEI ideology, prove your loyalty to the new religion.
I don't understand why you are calling it a religion.
What has been your personal experience with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in employment?
Mine has been that I watched a few videos that basically said: don't hit on people at work, don't mock people for disabilities, and don't treat people as lesser based on physical attributes.
In other words, don't be an asshole to people at work.
The only people I've seen given preferential treatment at work have been those who suck up to the leadership to get promoted.
This is an interesting question.
I've seen it implemented in a couple of ways. One of the simplest is stronger blinding of applications so you aren't biased by irrelevant personal information.
For example this has been pretty effective in astronomy (proposals to get time on competitive instruments) where applications with female names were less likely to be approved. Simply removing the name was enough to improve the situation.
The fallacy is that people think DEI encourages preferential or token "diversity hires". When implemented correctly, it should mean that successful applications (for jobs, grants, whatever) go to the most qualified or deserving candidate using unbiased/impersonal metrics. That may mean encouraging minority groups to apply, but at the time of review, you should have no idea who the applicant is.
> The fallacy is that people think DEI encourages preferential or token "diversity hires".
Why do you say it is a fallacy when the E in DEI stands for the so called equity, which means exactly that. You seem to be describing equality, which is something that DEI was intended to supersede.
When you look at pre-Trump guidelines for FAA job applications, for example, there is an explicitly described preferential process for hiring from the favored groups.
"I don't understand why you are calling it a religion."
Because it is using racism to try to cure racism and if you point out that this is wrong you will be called racist.
>I don't understand why you are calling it a religion.
There's a book on the topic: "Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America" by John McWhorter
There's also a documentary online: https://x.com/MikeNayna/status/1861213812046864768
...which shows a specific instance of the religion take hold at Evergreen State.
What you are describing is the motte. What happened to James Damore was the bailey.
Did he fail a critical vibe check / badly fail to read the room? Sure. Given the political climate I'm not surprised he was fired.
But is everyone already forgetting what things were like?
> Given the political climate I'm not surprised he was fired.
He was fired because he placed himself in a position where at least half the company would refuse to work with him.
Not disagreeing with you.
It didn't matter if he was wrong or right, his mistake was entertaining the notion that people would entertain an earnest (if misguided) discussion when in fact that whole topic was taboo.
Questioning the status quo is very different from drawing conclusions the way he did. It should never be taboo to question whether DEI practices are fulfilling their goals or harming other metrics.
It definitely has been taboo to have that discussion for many, many years.
The topic is not "taboo". In an organization where compensation is based on non-anonymous peer review, you cannot have a person going around with their thesis that women are objectively inferior engineers. That person has to be fired (directly into the sun, when practical).
Is this based on a quote from management?
How did they measure who didn't want to work with him, did they survey the entire company?
Considering he more or less said women are less intelligent than men, I would guess at least about half were very offended.
No, he didn't say that. Don't misquote.
He posited that women might be less inclined towards programming due to inherent traits, such as being more people-oriented, suggesting that biological and psychological differences between men and women might explain the underrepresentation of women in tech.
So, maybe, not less intelligent, but, maybe, a poorer fit for a software engineer position than a person less "people oriented" and, therefore, that a lot of the women working as software engineers at Google were hired over more fitting men, because they were women.
Were you required to buy into it? Prove your “loyalty”? What do you mean?
Applying for government contracts, academia, NGOs - but also a lot of "big company" procurement processes - required DEI statements etc.
I have written what you would likely call "DEI" statements for grants and job applications, and I have reviewed them as well.
The absolutely worst statements are the people who believe that the statement is an ideological litmus test. It never was, and it isn't.
These statements, to a one, are basic HR stuff: discuss your strategies and experiences to not be an asshole and ensure that the diverse people you manage (and they almost certainly are diverse) will be able to get along and work effectively under your management. Boring stuff.
People think its some sort of ideological purity test, write it as such, and get surprised when the statement is evaluated poorly.
The requests are worded in a way that makes people think they're ideological because (as far as I can tell) the people who added it to the requirements were heavily influenced by their ideological commitments. The statements are then reviewed by volunteers taken from the broader community, who aren't going to rate "contributions to diversity" too highly if they're described with an extreme degree of force.
If the people writing the calls wanted the same things as the people reviewing the submissions, they would say, "tell us about your experiences with normal HR tasks."
In almost every case I've seen, the statements are in fact worded in terms of specific contributions. The most general terminology I've seen is requesting the candidate to explain their role "advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion"—to which the best statements respond with (1) their experiences with diverse classrooms/staff, and (2) their specific strategies for approaching these issues.
I have not really encountered instructions that I would misconstrue to be an ideological litmus test, and the majority of submissions that I have reviewed do not in fact talk about the candidate's ideological priors.
Calling it diversity is a huge ideological presupposition. Two white guys can create a hostile work environment for a third, there's nothing diversity specific about it. This is reflected in the way everyone thinks about it - you're not checking to see whether the experiences they're describing crossed the right identity boundaries, you're judging it according to the wrongs dealt and the submitter's sense of balance.
Institutions tend to define diversity broadly, including diversity in terms of race, nationality, gender, socioeconomic status, and so on. I don't talk much about race or gender in my own statements, instead focusing on first-generation students and socio-economic status. This seems not to have hurt me.
I get that the way people think about these statements is different than the way they actually are; I just think people are wrong and that their impression is informed by social media. If it helps, I would be happy to rebrand "DEI Statement" to "Don't be an asshole and also try to keep the peace with everyone Statement".
I think we agree although there's a slight miscommunication, you're not actually including socioeconomic status in your rephrased statement. Like we would both say, if there were three identical twins and two of them were picking on the other, that would merit the exact same intervention as if they weren't identical twins.
So you defend it on the grounds, specifically, correct me if I am misinterpreting, that it is nothong beyond a rebranding of typical HR legal speak? You either think it is important and meaningful or you don't-- ie it is a litmus test. I think it is useful as such frankly, but could be minimized. I am totally happy to pledge allegiance to non-racism or something like that. Some arcane limus test where only people like you can evaluate the true merit of a DEI statement is likely to be unfair, widely abused and ironically probably reinforces institutional racism more than it ameliotates it. Not calling you a hard racist, just saying you are contributing to it and sustaining it rather than reducing it.
I defend it on the grounds that it is basic human management. The scientific workforce is diverse, and this diversity introduces potential conflicts. Money spent on researchers who cannot effectively keep the peace among their students and staff—whether through negligence, naiveté, or outright malice—is likely to go to waste. It is not entirely a re-tooling of HR legal speak, but rather an extension given what we know about how to manage a diverse workforce.
The rubric I use to judge diversity statements, and which is often formalized in rubrics, is: "has the applicant thought about this at all to the point that they have specific experiences and strategies that lead us to trust that they could effectively manage a diverse population of students and staff".
There is nothing arcane about this. To the extent that diversity statements even factor in review, this is the same criteria that everyone I know follows.
In my own applications, I, as a white guy, have been very successful in getting jobs and funding. This is despite never making ideological commitments and barely talking about gender or race, and instead focusing on first-generation students. Just showing that I have put in a minimal amount of thought into working with diverse students and colleagues seems to be enough.
Nobody says they are against ideology. Everyone is pro-their own ideology and anti-everyone else's.
Additionally, I don't think there was an anti-China "smokescreen" used here. Anti-DEI was a central pillar of the Trump campaign, so this purge seems to be fully in line with what was stated explicitly for months in 2024.
It’s the classic authoritarian doublespeak: they are 100% supportive of your rights, freedom, and obligation to believe what they tell you to believe.
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> vetting projects that goes against the government's ideology
The tax payer should not be funding ideological projects. For example there shouldn't be a DEI astronaut requirement, in the same way there shouldn't be a religious or gun carrying requirement for astronauts.
In the UK I had a grant application denied based only on DEI, despite the grant being accepted as high value to the tax payer and likely to be successful.
> there shouldn't be a DEI astronaut requirement
So, back to the old "white guys only" astronaut hiring policy of the moon landings era? And that wasn't a merit policy, that was an explicitly discriminatory policy against women long after the Soviet Union sent Valentina Tereshkova into space.
(at time of writing, she is still alive and the only woman ever to have had a solo spaceflight!)
> In the UK I had a grant application denied based only on DEI
Calling BS on this, they're not going to simply state "DEI" as a reason.
> So, back to the old "white guys only" astronaut hiring policy of the moon landings era?
We should want the best astronauts, not the most diverse. It's the same as wanting the best doctor, or the best pilot.
The UK team for Olympic 100m is majority non-white. I have no doubt that these are amongst the fastest people in the world. Based on DEI standards, should we pick people who are shown slower just to make a more colourful team?
> Calling BS on this, they're not going to simply state "DEI" as a reason.
You can call BS all you like, the application literally stated it so. The threshold for funding was met, but was rejected on the basis.
> We should want the best astronauts, not the most diverse
Considering color or religion doesn't have any impact on the ability of someone to be a "best astronaut", if your groups isn't diverse, it's most likely there is a bias in action.
No, that isn't true at all. Employers can only hire from the pool that exists. If the applicant pool is 90% white dudes, then an unbiased hiring process will result in a very skewed employee demographic. Assuming bias based on differences in statistics is motivated reasoning and should not be entertained.
And why would the applicant pool be 90% white dudes?
Funny you'd use "best actor" as an example. What makes the best actor? For a long time there were no leading Asian male actors for example, is that because Asians can't act or because of cultural bias?
>So, back to the old "white guys only" astronaut hiring policy of the moon landings era?
Do you have any control over this?
I don't understand what you mean? Nobody has control over historical events? I don't control the astronaut policy?
People frequently accuse science they don't like of being like an "ideology".
"(Climate Change|Evolution|The concept of a flat earth) is like an ideology to some people — they get angry the minute you start to question it".
Just because something is Science, does not make it above being ideological. There is tonnes of evidence for this collected [0]:
> The trio set out with the intent to expose problems in what they called "grievance studies", referring to academic areas where they claim "a culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed ... and put social grievances ahead of objective truth".
They proved their point. When only papers of a certain conclusion are accepted which further an ideological belief, Science is dead.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
People may say that, although it isn't exactly hard to differentiate them. All scientific propositions/hypotheses/findings are "is" statements. Ideologies are made up of "ought" statements. There is no Venn diagram overlap
DEI exists to counterbalance something else that is in place. Can you say what that is?
Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia... It's a long list.
Meritocracy.
This is wrong, and based on a (largely deliberate) misunderstanding of what DEI is. DEI is not a push to have quotas. Rather it is based on the assumption that if you see one group being overrepresented then there is probably a bias in favor of that group.
If you look at CEOs you will see that white men are very overrepresented. I (as a white man) don't for a moment believe that that is because white men are better at being CEOs (achieve better outcomes). Rather I believe it is because the selection process has long been biased in favor of white men (both in the last steps, and the path to get there). And this is not just my biases at play, many studies have been done, and none show that white men generically achieve better outcomes.
So DEI is the idea that we need to make the selection process better account for people's biases (largely unconscious) that have been driving this outcome (white men preferentially being selected). It is not about quotas or giving people points for being a woman/black person/disabled/etc. It is all about making sure that those characteristics do not subtract points.
And I have used white men as an example here, as that has been where the largest biases have been (both white, and men), and also because I am currently a beneficiary of those biases, making it hard to argue that I am only arguing this to get an advantage for myself. But you could just as easily point to the current over-representation of women in colleges and universities and worry about an anti-man bias there.
If this were the case then they would be replacing the ideological conformity sections with different ideological conformity requirements. Instead they are simply stripping ideological requirements, period.
Whatever a scientist happens to believe in, these changes would not imperil his ability to receive government funding. But in the previous system, if one felt that unconditional merit was the most fundamental factor in science (and refused to simply lie) he would have been found it much more difficult to secure funding.
> Instead they are simply stripping ideological requirements, period
This is not true. If I submit a project to study the large-scale effect of DEI policies in institutions, that will get rejected because "anti-DEI" is in the current government's idelogy, as written down in presidential orders.
They are not simply removing the previous ideology and leaving a void in place. There are no voids in power structures.
> Instead they are simply stripping ideological requirements, period.
It does not sound like that. At least, not at the NSF, which is freezing funds until it's had an ideologically-driven purge.
The Office of Science seems to have a better approach, removing the need for the previous administration's PIER plan and ignoring any already submitted
You mean they're idealogically stripping idealogical requirements...
> Instead they are simply stripping ideological requirements, period.
That is literally the opposite of what the linked article claims. They aren't "stripping requirements" placed on funding, they're stripping the actual funds from existing grants, based on new requirements that just happen to be phrased along the lines of the ruling regime's political rhetoric.
Your Orwellian version only makes sense if you assume a priori that the funds were granted incorrectly, which again is sort of the opposite of what science is.
>Instead they are simply stripping ideological requirements, period.
This is the significant part.
Woke ideology was always unpopular when put to the test in the court of public opinion and sometimes even law. Whether it's entertainment products that got reviewbombed for incorporating "diversity", illegal hiring/enrollment quotas that once existed to enforce "inclusion", or the replacing of the word "equality" with "equity" because people started catching on that what was touted as equality actually wasn't.
Now that we have a President (and by extension a party) who was elected to get rid of all that, promises to do so are being kept.
As a Japanese-American, I 300% voted for and support this. Everyone should be judged on merit and merit alone, not whether they have the right skin color, sex organs/preferences, disabilities, or illnesses.
Im sure guys that think foreigners are dog eating criminals judge everyone based on merit now. We have a doctor with asian sounding name and people at work were wondering if they need translator when they visit.
The problem with this idea is that "woke" is a moving target that its enemies are defining. Will they change the definition to include things you don't want? Moreover, does it currently actually have the goal to make meritocracy? For example, they've allowed discrimination based on race in government hiring, for example, so that does not bode well for the idea of being judged on merit alone. Explicitly, they are now allowed to judge on race where they were not before. Read through project 2025 - is that what you actually want, because that's what he's gonna implement.
>For example, they've allowed discrimination based on race in government hiring ... Read through project 2025
I advise you read through the actual Executive Orders than some false propaganda material of at best questionable value.
What Trump is mandating with his EOs are a move back to judging people strictly by their merit, by their character. We are once again on the path to making Martin Luther King's dream a reality.
Here are the EOs with regards to the subject matter at hand:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/endi...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/refo...
>Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great.
>Federal employment practices, including Federal employee performance reviews, shall reward individual initiative, skills, performance, and hard work and shall not under any circumstances consider DEI or DEIA factors, goals, policies, mandates, or requirements.
----
>This Federal Hiring Plan shall: ... prevent the hiring of individuals based on their race, sex, or religion, and prevent the hiring of individuals who are unwilling to defend the Constitution or to faithfully serve the Executive Branch;
>prevent the hiring of individuals based on their race, sex, or religion, and prevent the hiring of individuals
Did you know the EO that was rescinded had similar verbiage too?[1]
[1] https://archives.federalregister.gov/issue_slice/1965/9/28/1...
MLK explicitly supported reparations for black people. He did not support a system of institutional colorblindness. You can only get this from his writing if you take one famous line from one famous speech and ignore the rest of what he wrote.
> What Trump is mandating with his EOs are a move back to judging people strictly by their merit, by their character. We are once again on the path to making Martin Luther King's dream a reality.
Trump has outright been banning transgender individuals from enlisting in the military and serving. Presumably in a merit-based society you would judge them on the basis of merit, not on a secondary characteristic.
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> It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that people who are internally confused about themselves and require/demand extensive specialized medical treatments and care are most likely not suited to serve in the military.
Trans people I know are very sure about themselves. More than some cis people in fact. I will let RAND Corporation rebut the rest of your speculation.[1]
The effect on force readiness is an important consideration in any military policy change. Many types of medical treatments can lead to lost labor and leave personnel temporarily unable to deploy. Given the small estimated number of transgender personnel and the even smaller number who would seek gender transition–related treatment in a given year, the study found that the readiness impact of transition-related treatment would lead to a loss of less than 0.0015 percent of total available labor-years in the active component. Even using the highest estimates, less than 0.1 percent of the force would seek gender transition–related treatment that would affect their ability to deploy. As a point of comparison, in the Army alone, approximately 50,000 active-component personnel were ineligible to deploy in 2015 for various legal, medical, or administrative reasons—a number amounting to around 14 percent of the active component.
A key concern in allowing transgender personnel to serve openly is how this may affect unit cohesion. The underlying assumption is that if service members discover that a member of their unit is transgender, this could inhibit bonding within the unit, which, in turn, would reduce operational readiness. Similar concerns were raised in debates over whether to allow gay and lesbian personnel to serve openly, as well as over whether to allow women to serve in ground combat positions. However, evidence from foreign militaries and the U.S. military has indicated no significant impact on unit cohesion or operational readiness as a result of allowing transgender and gay and lesbian personnel to serve openly or allowing women to serve in ground combat positions.
[1] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/R...
There's a more sensible middle-ground here, in that the military should have no problem enlisting people with gender identity beliefs - just as it's fine for military personnel to hold varying religious beliefs - but that no-one else should be obliged to accept these beliefs as true, and that the military should not have to fund any cosmetic procedures to make an individual appear to be of the opposite sex. While also not discriminating against anyone for having these beliefs.
This is a sensible middle-ground approach for the rest of society too. Just treat it like a minority religious belief, then the issue is solved fairly without stepping on anyone's rights.
If both Republicans and Democrats agreed to this approach and put this issue to bed, they could get on with wrangling over much more important problems of governance.
> should not have to fund any cosmetic procedures to make an individual appear to be of the opposite sex
Why is this a talking point? Gender affirming surgeries are extremely rare. Very few trans people go through with them. And even when they do, recovery times are in the order of days or weeks which has little to no impact on the efficacy of the fighting force.
The main things trans people want are:
1. That people treat them with basic human dignity and respect.
2. Access to gender affirming medications. It ultimately doesn't really matter who pays for them because they cost nothing. They are quite literally some of the cheapest medications on the market. Estradiol without insurance costs like 10-20USD for a 3 month supply. Testosterone about the same or less. Androgen blockers cost like 1-5USD for a 3 month supply. You could not find cheaper medications and most pharmacies won't even run insurance for them because they are so cheap. The reason the military "needs" to pay for them is because they need to run the medication through their logistics network so that it is accessible where it is needed.
The cost is irrelevant. What matters is that the medication can get delivered to ships and bases in a timely manner. And that is why the military pays for it.
Why should cosmetic interventions, whether pharmaceutical or surgical, to give an individual the appearance of secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex, be something the military should have any interest in doing? It doesn't help its mission does it.
We allow people to self-identify their religious beliefs. The government doesn't declare you to be a Catholic or a Buddhist and force your driver's license to say such.
Unless you're proposing making the military- and the rest of society- radically gender neutral, than as soon as a person interacts with a driver's license, passport, social media account, or bathroom, they will have to adopt a gender identity . Why should a third party's "gender beliefs" about a person be elevated above their own?
(I also can't see a justification for denying hormone replacement therapy treatment- it's cheap and ridiculously beneficial for mental health. But, for the same reasons, I advocate its availability over-the-counter.)
The architectural solution to gender neutral bathrooms is floor to ceiling panels and doors that actually close. It's quite simple and extremely common in newer buildings in Europe.
Driver's license and passport record sex, and bathrooms and other spaces that are separated for women and men are done so on the basis of sex.
Being an objective measurement of material biological state, sex isn't the same type of thing as a gender identity belief, which is indeed self-declared like a religion is.
Just a reminder that earlier up you said:
>Everyone should be judged on merit and merit alone, not whether they have the right skin color, sex organs/preferences, disabilities, or illnesses.
But now you are taking your preconceived notion of what every trans person must think and disqualifying the entire group from the military before they have an opportunity to prove whether or not they meet the requirements.
Not very merit-based of you.
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>What Trump is mandating with his EOs are a move back to judging people strictly by their merit, by their character.
Conservatives are OK with rolling everything back and hiding behind words, since right now, most people at the highest levels of power - that do the judging - are white men.
How else do you explain such "merit" based nominations like Hegseth for SecDef, Gaetz for Attorney General, etc. (Gaetz withdrew but getting nominated at all was ridiculous). And if Hegseth is qualified to lead the DoD, then so is anybody who ever served in the military at the rank of Major or higher.
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I've been called several dozen kinds of labels to try and get me to be a nice and cooperative victim. I've also found myself labeled as the oppressor, as Asians are(were) often found too successful unlike other minorities.
Sincerely screw all that racist noise with extreme prejudice. In this regard, the Left did more work than anyone to get me to vote Trump.
You must be aware the US operated concentration camps for US citizens of Japanese origins during WWII, right?
This seems great. It's increasingly apparent that the government was spending countless billions of dollars to push ideology in plainly weird ways. Why should somebody researching e.g. fusion for the Department of Energy also need to create a Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) plan, to even apply?
This should greatly reduce the overall bureaucratic nonsense in science and help get back to science simply being science without imposing ideological conformity tests.
> Why should somebody researching e.g. fusion for the Department of Energy also need to create a Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) plan, to even apply?
To try to ensure that the people working on the project are selected fairly and on merit, rather than unfairly and on personal prejudice.
You can read about PIER plan requirements here. [1] Archive since the page is already dead. Things are moving ridiculously fast for government to the point I suspect there was alot of desire to get rid of all this stuff before, but people were unable to do so.
Anyhow it had nothing to do with the merit of the project or the team which were obviously already being evaluated. It was nothing but an unrelated ideological conformity test added as a requirement.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20230104150813/https://science.o...
If your goal is to break things, then yes, you can move fast.
> Anyhow it had nothing to do with the merit of the project or the team which were obviously already being evaluated
Oh thats an interesting point to make. Were you part of these things? I really like unbiased merit based societies, so I was wondering what your experience was.
> I really like unbiased merit based societies
Just thought I would recommend some reading about this: "The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?" by Michael Sandel.
Basically, think about what the longer-term, overarching effects on society would be in a perfectly-meritocratic society. It likely wouldn't be all unicorns and rainbows.
Here's a review about it: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/08/montage-michael-sand...
May not change your mind, but we should always try to expand it :)
Merit is somewhat paradoxically only partially about ability. If it turns out the most testably intelligent person chooses to spend his life flipping burgers and smoking weed then he has no more merit than the most testably dumb person who chose similarly.
In other words a perfect meritocracy isn't Gattaca. It's just a place where your rise isn't going to be directly constrained by things outside of your control, like in Gattaca - being directly rejected because of one's DNA.
In a meritocracy a fool who finds and excels at a niche can thrive, while a genius who doesn't exert himself can languish.
Do note that I was instigating a point. (is it instigating?)
The point of my question to the poster was whether they had been part of any such processes.
I do appreciate the point on merit, and have a richer view of it than I may have let on.
> Things are moving ridiculously fast for government to the point I suspect there was alot of desire to get rid of all this stuff before, but people were unable to do so.
Assuming "was alot of desire" is meant as "widespread support," not just "the President really desired it," that is an absolutely ridiculous interpretation. Fast does not mean strong consensus.
The government has also moved _ridiculously fast_ to
- pardon/commute the vast majority of J6 defendants including those convicted of violence towards law enforcement
- freeze federal aid across the board
- blame the recent aviation crash on DEI
- rename the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America
- revoke birthright citizenship
Does that mean that there "was alot of desire" to do those things? Absolutely not. It just means that those are things that the President has done unilaterally via executive orders or press release.
To be clear I'm not advocating for or against the govt.
But the idea that the government moving "ridiculously fast" is because there "was alot of desire" is a massive stretch. They are moving fast because they are steamrolling everyone in their path (allies included), and in their desire to "get shit done" they are implementing changes that are riddled with errors, and in some cases, even flat out illegal.
Great resource. imo Trump is jerking the wheel too hard in the other direction but some of this stuff was legitimately crazy. FAQ:
Q: I am only requesting support for one graduate student; do I still need to submit a PIER Plan?
A: Yes, all applications for funding to the Office of Science, with the exception of supplemental proposals, conference proposals, and proposals to the SBIR/STTR Programs (at this time), require a PIER Plan. All applicants are encouraged to consider what contributions they can make to creating more equitable and inclusive research environments. It is expected that the complexity and detail of a PIER Plan for a smaller research project and fewer project personnel would be less than that for a larger research project. [and no we won't provide you an example, it needs to be from your heart]
When you're requiring the greengrocer to submit a personalized statement justifying how each single apple he sells contributes to the project of worldwide socialism you might be risking provoking a reactionary counterrevolution. Americans need to just chill with trying to enforce micromanaged ideological conformity on a continent-sized country of 350 million people. And avoid winding up in a place "eroded by the ideological rituals that the entire power structure depend on, 'that are ever less credible, exactly because they are untested by public discussion and controversy'".
I applied for and won a small NASA ROSES citizen science seed funding grant ($80K). The call focused on outreach and equity in a way that encouraged me come up with a plan to get underprivileged high school students involved. This improved my results and made a difference in their lives.
And now even involving underprivileged high school students voluntarily, without being asked, could get your grant revoked.
The pendulum went from "DEI totally just means learning about slavery in school, everything else you're noticing is just in your head" to "everything bad is caused by DEI". I hope once this runs its course we can find a middleground between the extremes.
I think the groups saying each of those things are the same groups that have been saying those same things for quite a while already.
I'm sorry, but this hope needs to be put to rest. This political reality has been under construction since Watergate.
The winner take all, take no prisoners approach worked. Its counteracted evolution, climate science, even reality. Creating your own media outlet, ditching bi-partishanship, has only helped the Republicans.
People here are talking about how MAGA is not the conservative voter. This is a distinction without a purpose, because Maga and the Tea Party movements won elections.
The left and dems must and will follow suit.
You will only see more extreme points, and frankly outright violence. This is only the first 11 days. The impacts of removing fact checkers and the new free speech moderation stance is going to result in a direct uptick of hate speech.
As things get worse, theres going to be even more incitement with utterly fabricated content. This is going to only further entrench the dominance of the media powerhouse that exists.
The greater the animosity, the easier people are going to respond to the perceived threats - and since being disconnected from reality works, it will not matter if its true or not.
All that matters now is winning elections.
>As things get worse, theres going to be even more incitement with utterly fabricated content.
Speaking of fabricated content, are you describing the actual future or a simulation of it?
Hmm. Dunno, I can't really answer that without sounding like I am tooting my own horn. Would it help further if I said that my day job is about disinfo/ fraudulent content, and that I make these statements based on work experience?
I could add that I've made these calls, since 2008, and they've been predictable.
Thing is, any rando online can claim these things, so I don't know how to answer your comment.
So what would you look for to differentiate between prediction and simulation?
You are interpreting this through a really uncharitable lens. That statement is not about ideology, the whole premise is stewardship of taxpayer funds.
If a grad student is funded on the project but gets pushed out because of toxic culture, discrimination, or some other kind of marginalization, then that is a waste of research funds and slows down research. Successful teams need to be able to work together effectively and mitigate conflicts. People are diverse, and conflicts are likely to arise because of this: anyone running a research team needs a plan to manage their team, just as they need a plan to manage their data. Its boring HR stuff that is necessary in a diverse society.
Ah yes asking people to consider how they can be inclusive. Such unabashed hate for merit. Literally 1984. Definitely deserves all the vitriole and backlash we're seeing. /s
> Things are moving ridiculously fast for government to the point I suspect there was alot of desire to get rid of all this stuff before, but people were unable to do so.
No, Trump brought in a bunch of veterans of Elon’s takeover of Twitter to do the same thing to the federal government. The people at the top have been replaced, and the new agency leaders are focusing on implementing this anti-DEI agenda at the expense of pretty much everything else right now.
The sense I get from friends who work for the federal government is that this really feels like a hostile takeover. These are not changes that people welcome but have been too scared to ask for.
Here's a take that I came across which I'd like your views on if possible:
When the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act were created, people asked the government to enforces these acts. Whatever you think of merits of DEI, the government decided to create DEI in order to enforce the Civil Rights Act and Americans with Disabilities act.
The problem is because they decided that DEI would be the mechanism to do this with, once DEI is rescinded the question is: If you're not going to enforce the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act through DEI, which mechanism do you plan to use to enforce them? According to this take, once DEI is rescinded there is no mechanism to enforce the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act anymore.
I'm pretty sure that most leftwing and rightwing people will agree that out of 3 millions government workers it's not entirely unlikely that there would be some some valid cases of discrimination against minorities and those with disabilities. The claim is that, whether DEI sucks or not, there is no avenue to contest racism and discrimination in government hiring anymore.
The Civil Rights Act and related topics are part of the US Code (laws) [1] and are completely unrelated to DEI. The legal redresses available for discrimination have not changed whatsoever.
The Civil Rights Act is exclusively about equality of opportunity and requires affected employers hire without regard to race, religion, and other protected classes. So for instance universities using racial quotas was deemed unlawful precisely because of the Civil Rights Act.
DEI stuff was in a very different spirit that really ran against the ideals of the Civil Rights Act. For instance it compelled affected organizations to specifically endeavour to hire based on the race and other characteristics of applicants. It's not entirely clear to me why it wasn't tossed immediately as being in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
[1] - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/chapter-21
DEI is a way to avoid disparate impact liability. Such laws / precedent is derived from the Civil Rights Act (VII). So it is quite the opposite. It also means that disparate impact liability will return without DEI / race quotas so unless the new administration also gets rid of disparate impact and the civil rights act this whole thing will end up right back where it started.
> Whatever you think of merits of DEI, the government decided to create DEI in order to enforce the Civil Rights Act and Americans with Disabilities act.
This part is foundational to the rest, and it's straightforwardly untrue. The government agency which most often enforces these two laws is called the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which remains active under the new administration; the new acting chair has given no indication that she intends to stop enforcing the Civil Rights Act or the ADA.
Thanks for the info.
Doesn't "revoking the Equal Employment Opportunity executive order" entail that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will be affected? [0]
EDIT:
Trump also fired the EEOC chair it seems. Can the commision work with just two commisioners if he doesn't hire a replacement?
“These removals leave the E.E.O.C. without a quorum, which hobbles the agency’s ability to protect workers from unlawful discrimination,” [1][2]
[0] https://archive.is/QHQJD
[1] https://archive.is/C1voe
[2] https://www.lawandtheworkplace.com/2025/01/eeoc-like-nlrb-la...
The "Equal Employment Opportunity executive order" predates the EEOC and doesn't affect its responsibilities.
The EEOC doesn't depend on a quorum for routine enforcement actions. As the last article describes, what it can't do without a quorum is make new rules or issue new guidance, but the new administration will most likely reestablish a quorum soon because there's some existing guidance they'd like to revoke.
Considering a candidates suitability for a role based on their race, gender, or sexual orientation is the opposite merit based selection.
Huh? Really? Aren't people by default biased towards their ingroups and things familiar to them?
Don't we make movies of the times someone actually got noticed and was able to enrich our society through their merit?
Perhaps I am wrong.
The whole concept of 'got noticed' runs entirely contrary to the notion of merit, to an absurd degree in tech.
One does not hope to get noticed - they strive to excel on their own or by bringing others in to help them.
Your merit is not what you might achieve, but what you do achieve.
Really? We're rational here, which is pretty much meant to be the hallmark of techies.
> The whole concept of 'got noticed' runs entirely contrary to the notion of merit, to an absurd degree in tech. >Your merit is not what you might achieve, but what you do achieve.
Taking it seriously, I can see several situations where these rules do not hold true.
However, that may be me reading in factors you exclude for the purposes of your point.
So let me turn it to you - can you consider circumstances where these statements wouldn't hold true? Or are they absolute in your eyes?
If they are absolute, I would definitely want to understand your defintions, since I can conceive of many obvious cases where these points are violated.
But since they are obvious, I am assuming you haven't overlooked them in the way you envision things.
Is that not what Equal Protection under the 14A (applied to the USG through the Due Process clause of the 5A) is for?
Without enforcement mechanisms (a PIER plan in this context), the 14th Amendment is just blots of ink on paper.
A PIER plan is not Equal Protection. For the last few years, a PIER plan is explicitly about Un-equal Protection in the service of achieving "equitable" outcomes.
The US Constitution protects the people from excessive acts of government, not the other way around. It says nothing about "enforcement mechanisms" which, should any actually be enacted by the legislature or ordered by the executive, are subject to constitutional challenge by the people before the judiciary (unless rendered moot by a superseding legislative act or executive order).
Our constitutional republic is not merely "just blots of ink on paper" but rather alive and well.
I wonder what could go wrong with constraining federal funding to political ideas the current president personally approves of?
"Great" isn't how anyone will describe it once the second-order consequences land. (There won't be many who like it once the first-order consequences land.)
Sure now apply this thinking to the transition from the pre-DEI times to the status quo which Trump et al are dismantling
You may agree with the incoming anti-DEI policies, but don't let that obscure what's happening here.
Previously, federal funding was controlled by congress, and subject to its collective politics, via long-playing out machinations/compromises/horse-trading, etc, and then to the collective politics of the various enforcement bodies.
It now appears that federal funding is generally subject to the personal politics of the current president. That may seem nice for the specific policies you agree with. But... there are likely to be many policies you don't agree with. Especially since there will be a new president after not too long.
Also, since political purity tests have to be subjectively enforced, they are inevitably subverted to corruption. You can pass the test with the right amount of money delivered to the right people in the right way. That's nice for the people receiving the money, but the corruption quickly becomes horrifically inefficient and costly.
The question isn't whether the previous system was perfect -- it wasn't. The question is whether the new system is worse, and how much worse.
I'm pretty surprised how unaware people seem to be about the power/money grab that is happening. People never seem to learn that you have to look at what people do, not what they say.
Having the government do anti -DEI purity tests for research is the exact opposite or reducing bureaucracy.
Funny how they replaced one performative mantra with another, which is just the same as the one they wanted to get rid of: you have to recite the $SYMBOL_OF_FAITH before you can have a job or apply for a grant.
In fairness, that's what all political types do. It's all just quasi-religion all the way down. Anyone who thought any different was fooling themselves. It's unfortunate that it comes at the expense of scientific research, but hey, that's what people voted for.
Everyone in the US is getting exactly the government we deserve. That's the beauty of democracy! You get government that's precisely as good, or as bad, as you deserve. And you deserve government no better, or worse, than what you get.
Basically, we deserve it.
This is an ideological conformity test.
Yes, being opposed to discrimination is an ideological conformity test.
Other way around — prohibiting steps to reduce discrimination is the test.
They’ve literally banned efforts to ensure research is free of discrimination. We’re in opposite world, or at least pretending to be.
You do realize that the EO this replaced has almost the exact verbiage about discrimination, right? We should be focusing on what is different between the two instead of being sidetracked by that argument.
Because DEI audience leaned Democrats and everyone here is trying the hide the sun with a transparent glass. This is backfiring in a big way and the only hope is that it sets strict rules to who gets the money (ie: rather than going the other way, where the incumbent disburse the money to his audience).
I don't understand what you're saying. Who's hiding the sun through transparent glass?
This is not backfiring at all, great success, people are really happy about this. Trump's approval rating is higher than ever.
His approval rating is historically low: https://news.gallup.com/poll/655955/trump-inaugural-approval...
I wonder how his approval will compare with his first term. His final approval rating is the lowest of any president ever: https://news.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approval-ra...
Nothing says reducing overall bureaucratic nonsense by adding more bureaucratic nonsense AND demanding people make a loyalty pledge.
>Why should somebody researching e.g. fusion for the Department of Energy also need to create a Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) plan, to even apply?
Why?
Because a homogenous culture of researchers is less effective.
Because you are not just doing research on a topic, you are also training the next generation of scientists and field experts.
And the implication that the old boys club of white dudes is intrinsically the best "meritocratic" outcome is ridiculous. The history of science is full of people who had to fight that norm and succeed despite it.
> This should greatly reduce the overall bureaucratic nonsense in science and help get back to science simply being science without imposing ideological conformity tests.
Sure, sure. Except for the part where they're also censoring any science topics deemed "woke", where all funding now has to meet the president's ideological conformity test on subject and staff as well.
Your stereotypes belie a lack of familiarity with researchers. Here [1] are the demographics of PhD researchers.
White individuals are significantly under represented (and even more so in STEM) though it's not for any nefarious reason. Science has traditionally been merit > all. And lots of highly skilled individuals from China, India, and so on are pursuing education and work in the US, which makes the competition for these spots very different than a random sampling of Americans.
[1] - https://www.zippia.com/phd-researcher-jobs/demographics/
You either don't know what you're a talking about or a in bad faith. The demographic or PhD researchers is, in fact, the problem because the ration of women to men is very high at the beginning of the career but declines as the career progresses and becomes embarrassing at the professorial stage. This is the whole reason why DEI became essential because it aimed at removing those anti-meritocratic barriers that promoted male career at the expenses of females.
This is the case in biological sciences, for instance, the field I am in: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Scissors-Diagram-Showing...
I wonder if there are any biological reasons for why women would drop out of a professional workforce over time.
I think that researchers from China, India, and so one should also have plans to effectively manage the diverse set of students and staff they are likely to work with while in the U.S.
> Your stereotypes belie a lack of familiarity with researchers
I was referencing what the current Trump administration deems "meritocratic" and seeks to "return" to, their policy changes are in direct response and opposition to the demographics you describe.
“Science being science…” Climate science would like a word.
> It's increasingly apparent that the government was spending countless billions of dollars to push ideology in plainly weird ways.
Did you miss the last 80 years of anti-communist, pro-capitalist, free-market propaganda? The american government has been the most powerful ideological force in the world for basically all of living memory.
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You're definitely right and I also do not agree with that stuff either, but it was mostly done "appropriately" in that it was through avenues, like the State Department or CIA, who have propaganda as part of their mission.
In this case you had things like the Department of Energy requiring Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research plans to even apply for funding.
The two big differences I see is that that is a wholly inappropriate avenue for ideological enforcement, and that it's also exceptionally divisive.
Things are changing in modern times but historically free markets, capitalism, and so on were very widely shared values. The contemporary equality of outcome (versus opportunity) stuff is extremely new and extremely divisive. The government pushing it, and frequently in very inappropriate ways (the military also comes to mind) is just very weird.
> requiring Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research plans
> equality of outcome (versus opportunity) stuff is extremely new and extremely divisive
Equality of outcome, in the sense that we should hire unqualified people for research positions, is thankfully an incredibly rare and frankly insane position that almost nobody holds. Also thankfully, that's not what these required plans were. The requirement was that groups applying for grants have a specific and actionable plan for making sure that equality of opportunity was ensured. In fact, advantaging one group over another, such as with quotas, would directly violate DEI policy[1]. Typically, a plan would reference existing enrollment/acceptance policies of the company/university/department making an application, which are designed to make sure employees/students are not advantaged or disadvantaged by immutable or protected characteristics. Common examples would be:
- Make sure that your hiring panel is diverse to avoid bias towards whatever groups are over-represented at your company already. It's a well-studied phenomena that people are inclined to like others who are similar to themselves. Without any other factors in play (skill is randomly distributed in applicants, all of your employees are free of sexual/racial bias), if your company consists of, say, 80% men and 20% women, and you pick your interviewers totally at random, you will continue to hire more men than women. If you use a 50/50 split on your interview panel then your hiring becomes more meritocratic by virtue of factoring out self-similarity biases.
- Implement structured interviews and standardized qualifications-based hiring, rather than relying on interviewer preference.
- Learning about potential subconscious biases helps people account for them. Incorporating bias training can mitigate (though not eliminate) hiring biases. Of course, as you have no doubt experienced, these training courses tend to be pretty boring and patronizing, but that's true of most employee training, so /shrug.
- Diversifying applicant sourcing. If you only look for applicants via one platform, adding some more that tend to be used by different groups to your sourcing strategy.
You have bought into the oft-repeated lie that DEI is some Harrison Bergeron-esque attempt to cripple institutions. You were probably pointed to one or two extremely poor implementations of such policies that were genuinely unfair. The broader movement, and most implementations of it, are about equality of opportunity. The intentional destruction of public perception of these policies and subsequent removal only guarantees that existing self-perpetuating gaps in opportunity will persist.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241222222206/https://science.o...
Archive link, because of course the new admin took down the page.
> advantaging one group over another, such as with quotas
> Make sure that your hiring panel is diverse
How do you make sure your hiring panel is diverse without having diversity quotas for it?
You have to be proactive, but the specifics will vary depending on how you do your hiring. That may look like specifically requesting that employees belonging to underrepresented groups volunteer for recruitment, or best-effort selecting each candidate's panel to represent as many groups as possible. You could do quotas for the panelists, but only if participation wasn't important for career progress. To be clear: these quotas would only apply to members of the panel selected from the pool of eligible employees. Hiring quotas are unfair and harmful.
> Equality of outcome, in the sense that we should hire unqualified people for research positions, is thankfully an incredibly rare and frankly insane position that almost nobody holds. Also thankfully, that's not what these required plans were. The requirement was that groups applying for grants have a specific and actionable plan for making sure that equality of opportunity was ensured. In fact, advantaging one group over another, such as with quotas, would directly violate DEI policy[1].
I understand that many people say this, but academics routinely understand government DEI initiatives to be racial quotas. See for example https://archive.is/So06G about the NIH FIRST program. I don't think that DEI is secretly aiming to cripple institutions, but I do think that its advocates genuinely feel racial balancing is a good idea and dissemble about this in contexts where it would be illegal.
Please understand that if this administration had equality of opportunity as a goal it would not scrap and ban these programs, it would go after those abusing them. Make DEI Great Again. But no, the general belief of those opposed to DEI initiatives appears to be that we were a meritocracy already, and the way forward is to cease and stifle anyone that points out this is not the case, and stifle anyone attempts to establish equality of opportunity.
Racist hiring practices are illegal, and should remain so. If Trump has issued an EO to clarify this point, and language to this effect were added to DEI policies, it would be utterly uncontroversial. I would welcome a case being brought against a professor who actively avoided hiring white people under the guise of DEI to really drive home that such behavior is unlawful and unacceptable.
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Witches don't exist. The Communist Party USA wanted to violently overthrow democracy and replace it with a dictatorship headed by Stalin, and Communists in the US government who were working towards that goal by committing treason against the US did exist in the 1950's.
So no, it was not a witch hunt. Looking back, the "witch hunt" slur seems like gaslighting. "Communists, what communists? You're paranoid and crazy!". The release of the Venona documents is severely damning to the "witch hunt" accusers and vindicating to McCarthy's goals, if not his tactics.
> Witches don't exist
You're aware that dozens of women were hanged in Salem Massachusetts because people believed they were witches? So you're very glibly implying "witch hunts" are not a thing when not only are they a thing, but people in this country, have died due to them.
> vindicating to McCarthy's goals, if not his tactics.
The question was a litmus test for whether you are a person that subscribes to an orthodox perspective of history or heterodox - it is pointless to argue with someone that does not participate in a shared reality.
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The movie is called "Hidden Figures".
Movies tend to exaggerate for a dramatic effect.
Yes, racism existed, segregation existed. The situation you described didn't happen. Katherine G Johnson simply used the bathroom for whites.
Hollywood is not a trustworthy source. For anything.
Not even for mindless entertainment?
It's really contradictory that the party of less regulation are introducing more friction and bureaucracy in scientific research process. But then it's also the party of anti-science so I can see why.
It is counter-contradictor measures. It is against nay-sayer people who research and find out stuff. Being smart will cost you, because it's not the goal. Less research, and lower levels of education equals more people to fall for simplistic solutions and promisses. The definition of truth is being redefined, and open-minded research and education is in the way of that.
And it is always the same pattern.
It's only less regulation when it involves allowing big companies to do whatever they want. Rules for thee but not for me.
Less regulation for _companies_, more regulation for _people_.
I was told that corporations are people, my friend.
They are considered people only when it comes to rights, but not when it comes to restrictions and consequences.
this is pretzel logic.
It really shouldn't be easy for ideologues to spend other peoples money. There are entire parallel structures in government, academia and now in business not contributing one iota of effort towards whatever the directed goal of their organisations are principally for.
https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/dcl-social-behavio...
They are also the anti-government party, so sabotage is another motivating factor.
It's not a contradiction: wanting a small state implies both wanting a low burden of regulation on the private sector specifically, and also wanting a great deal of care to be taken with how money is spent by the government. It isn't a general argument for allowing arbitrary levels of public sector fraud or waste, and it feels bad faith to conflate these two things as if one implies the other. Nobody in the history of politics has argued on principle for a state that has high taxes yet doesn't enforce any rules on how the money is spent.
In this case, the administration believes a lot of the work the NSF funds isn't actually scientific. In that they are correct. The replication crisis has been rolling for 15 years now with no real improvements, largely because the people who distribute the money don't care if it gets used for things that are genuinely scientific or if it gets used for things that merely have the surface level appearance of being scientific. The NSF funds vast amounts of pseudo-science that can be trivially identified and people have been talking about these problems for years with no resolution. Apparently, they need some friction and bureaucracy as otherwise they won't do their jobs correctly. In a free market government intervention isn't required to solve this problem because free actors will just stop funding pseudo-scientific work after a while, but the NSF isn't running a free market, and so the problem just never gets solved.
This article focuses on social science but talks a bit about the general problems at the NSF at the end, and although it was written in 2020 thus at the start of the Biden administration the proposals the author makes for fixes are basically what's happening right now:
https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...
Nobody actually benefits from the present state of affairs, but you can't ask isolated individuals to sacrifice their careers for the "greater good": the only viable solutions are top-down, which means either the granting agencies or Congress (or, as Scott Alexander has suggested, a Science Czar). You need a power that sits above the system and has its own incentives in order: this approach has already had success with requirements for pre-registration and publication of clinical trials. Right now I believe the most valuable activity in metascience is not replication or open science initiatives but political lobbying
...
An NSF/NIH inquisition that makes sure the published studies match the pre-registration (there's so much """"""""""QRP"""""""""" in this area you wouldn't believe). The SEC has the power to ban people from the financial industry—let's extend that model to academia.21
...
It is difficult to convey just how low the standards are. The marginal researcher is a hack and the marginal paper should not exist. There's a general lack of seriousness hanging over everything—if an undergrad cites a retracted paper in an essay, whatever; but if this is your life's work, surely you ought to treat the matter with some care and respect.
Why is the Replication Markets project funded by the Department of Defense? If you look at the NSF's 2019 Performance Highlights, you'll find items such as "Foster a culture of inclusion through change management efforts" (Status: "Achieved") and "Inform applicants whether their proposals have been declined or recommended for funding in a timely manner" (Status: "Not Achieved"). Pusillanimous reports repeat tired clichés about "training", "transparency", and a "culture of openness" while downplaying the scale of the problem and ignoring the incentives. No serious actions have followed from their recommendations.
It's not that they're trying and failing—they appear to be completely oblivious. We're talking about an organization with an 8 billion dollar budget that is responsible for a huge part of social science funding, and they can't manage to inform people that their grant was declined! These are the people we must depend on to fix everything.
Riddle me this, what has the Republican party done to alleviate replication crisis in scientific research?
How about this move that we're discussing? Getting rid of openly ideological research grants will help the replication rate quite a bit, as that stuff is riddled with basic replication problems, much worse than the median paper. It's just too easy to take some grant money then publish something pseudo-scientific which sounds good to left wing ears, knowing that nobody will double check because they want it to be true.
As an example, a lot of research into "misinformation" is like that. It's not replicable out of the gate because the papers don't describe their procedure for deciding whether a claim is true or false. They just present random lists of things that conservatives tend to believe, assert that none of them are true / they're conspiracy theories, then do a survey and use the results to conclude that conservatives are dumb / Russian bots. That's it, that's the entire field. There's no methodology, no theories, nothing to be refined or refuted. There are thousands of papers like this, it's astonishing to witness.
I've been writing for years on the topic of bad science, and the fact that universities/granting bodies claim to care about science whilst simultaneously funding and celebrating this stuff is why their reputation has gone down the drain. The consequences were absolutely predictable. Nobody can claim they didn't see it coming.
Right now, there's just a grant freeze combined with a review to find the really nakedly partisan DEI stuff. That's nothing. Much more intense stuff is well within the Overton Window of possibilities by this point, like ramped up prosecutions or large scale defunding.
You're making so many vaporous claims that I doubt if it's even worth engaging.
I've been on HN for a decade and worked (tangentially) with the individual you're responding to- I don't think you should take the effort to respond at all. He's made up his mind that the current approach will improve things, and believes he has "data" to support it, but also seems absolutely naive about the intent and effects of the current administration's approaches.
Agreed. I myself was involved in academia close to a decade as well and participated in studies funded by NIH and NSF during Obama, Trump#1 and Biden era. This person has no clue how rigorous and competitive the grant review process is. If appealing to DEI was so successful in getting your study funded, everyone would do it. But it was never the case at least in my experience.
From the article:
>> For academic scientists, the list of banned activities could include efforts to increase diversity in the scientific workforce, collaborations with foreign scientists, and research on more environmentally friendly technologies.
These are not the "vast amounts of pseudo-science" that your comment refers to.
I have nothing against the ideas suggested in the 2020 blog post that you cite... it's just that is not what is happening because of the executive order.
The executive orders do not address bad science.
So overall, I agree with most ideas in your comment but I do not think it is relevant to the current situation. The administration is not trying to fix bad science.
+1. I'd even say they are promoting bad science by putting up people like RFJ Jr for cabinet positions.
The evil genius of this move is that it gets everybody arguing about DEI, and we’re letting the continued expansion of absolute executive power centered in the president go unchecked. It’s not even about party; this started with FDR or even earlier, massively expanded under LBJ and again under W and Obama, and now here we are. The president feels no obligation at all to execute what the Congress authorized him to. Instead the limits of power are whatever the president can get away with. We have a constitutional problem where the Congress is unwilling or unable to legislate effectively and the executive gets to make policy unilaterally. This is not the balance of powers from the U.S. constitution. This is something else.
> We have a constitutional problem where the Congress is unwilling or unable to legislate effectively and the executive gets to make policy unilaterally. This is not the balance of powers from the U.S. constitution
The Republican party controls both houses and the presidency, having already stacked the supreme court, so they get to do whatever they want and there is no balance of powers.
Inevitable consequence of a two-party system with first past the post voting.
There is still a very clear balance of power.
All Republicans and all Democrats don’t act and think as one. Take any collection of humans, of any size, and their opinions will be spread across a spectrum.
There are, and always will be, some members in either house and of any party that find it’s in their political interest to debate and pull new laws left or right.
This is especially true under FPTP because each member has to answer to an area, and different areas of a country have baked-in differences in their ideal political outcomes and points of view.
Balance of powers has nothing to do with party; it’s about the ability of one branch of government to operate without constraint by the other branches of government. It was instituted in the US by people who were trying to take lessons from history; both recent (the Intolerable Acts) and ancient (Appius Claudius, Octavian, Alexander, the Thirty), and it’s been forgotten by generations who’ve come to take its protections for granted.
Looking at the past voting records, Democrats often vote as a block in both houses of Congress. The same can't be said about Republicans.
I feel like that's pretty disingenuous to say that. They have both been increasing party line voting for decades. https://rollcall.com/2021/03/03/no-quarter-for-centrists-in-...
Trump has definitely purged the Republican party of its most moderate members, leaving him surrounded by only the most radical of sycophants. Why do you put so much trust into your institutions? Trump has promised that "we won't ever have to vote ever again", he has been made untouchable by the supreme court, and is now passing budgetary laws without congress.
The opposition is powerless, his own party has become an echo chamber for fascist talking points.
This is a naive, context-free misunderstanding of the present moment based on supposedly intuitive truisms. The Republican party is Trump's party and has been for years now. Pretending there is that much variation that matters is ridiculous and can be remedied by reading any piece of news from the last few years.
The US is now a formal democracy, but it doesn't work as one. There is one guy making decisions, the remaining are either too feeble to do anything about or just fine with the status quo. Yes, there are formal avenues for responses, like the judiciary system, but they've been made toothless. The very fact that Trump is back in the WH is proof of this.
If that were true then we wouldn't be watching a collection of circus performers get confirmed by congress.
FPTP is a superior option to proportional representation. Belgium still lacks a federal government despite voting 5 months before the Americans and being just some 10 million people and we aren't going to get one either before they get their whole cabinet (minister equivalents) confirmed and installed. This is because there are 5 parties trying form a coalition raging from nationalist-separatist to socialist-rebranded-to-progressive across 2 languages. Brussels lacks its regional government too and is even further away from resolving the impasse.
America would be well advised to avoid this. They'd immediately get a language divide between English and Spanish. The alleged "grand coalitions" of the Democrat and Republican parties would crumble. There might be some consensus in the center which might be large enough but then policies would never change regardless of who you vote for, just like in the times before Trump.
> The Republican party controls both houses and the presidency, having already stacked the supreme court, so they get to do whatever they want and there is no balance of powers.
- No, the supreme court is the same size it's always been.
- No, members of congress don't always vote the party line (although this has consistently gotten worse over time)
- No, that's not what "balance of powers" means.
>The Supreme Court is the same size is always been
“The number of Justices on the Supreme Court changed six times before settling at the present total of nine in 1869”
https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/institution.aspx
Stacking here is about the make up of the benchm not size. I don't understand this link, its seems like an obvious point.
Partisanship works in the current political environment. Cutting off your own projects in case the other party follows your lead, has paid off more than bipartisanship. Voting across aisles is strictly controlled.
Trump was voted in precisely because The R base was tired of people talking about identity issues, getting to power, and then doing nothing about it.
Trump is giving people exactly what they were told would solve their problems, for decades.
The balance of powers has been broken, for good reason. It ensures political goals - see Bi-partisanship doesn't pay.
> - No, the supreme court is the same size it's always been.
Stacked in the sense that more members were appointed by one party vs the other (including one by dubious means), and those people apparently are quite partisan.
Point of order, the supreme court has changed size 6 times
https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/institution.aspx#:~:text=...
A point of order means someone has violated congressional procedure.
Or just Robert's Rules.
Right, but disagreeing with something is just a point, not a point of order.
1.) non sequitur
2.) missing the point
3.) pedantic
The point is that the current party in power has had multiple opportunities to reign in the current lawlessness and the current minority party has attempted to do so, to no result.
I think it’s a little early to call the end of the U.S. Constitution. There is a time component to the rule of law that can be frustrating in the moment but has always been true.
The President is free to assert his desires. Other parts of the country are free to push back if they choose. This takes filing lawsuits, lobbying Congress, pursuing prosecutions, etc. all of which take time, money, and effort. Which in turn allows short-term disruption to happen as the legal process plays out. Which again, is frustrating.
Political mood is also more fickle than people usually believe at the beginning of a new administration. FDR, LBJ, W, Obama, and many other presidents passed through a time in which conventional wisdom held that they had changed the game and amassed too much power. In every case we can look back and see that while they each have left a legacy that endures, it’s smaller than expected at the time. The pendulum swung the other way later on.
My own opinion on this is that “don’t tell me what to do” is among the most popular political positions among Americans. So for example, to the extent DEI felt like being told what to do, it became unpopular. But now that anti-DEI is in power, I expect the bloom will come off pretty quickly. In part because of overreach by a new administration overestimating their mandate. (As most new administrations do.)
Agreed, I wouldn’t call it the end either. But it’s a problem for our system of government and I think it’s worth calling attention to.
> I think it’s a little early to call the end
I don't. This has been a long, gradual erosion of constitutional rights, and now the system has crumbled. It may appear to stand, but it's merely resting on the rubble.
SCOTUS is going to rule with GOP doctrine, regardless of what the constitution says. The GOP may pursue legal avenues for their actions in an attempt to not make it so apparent that the country is now under single party, totalitarian rule. But they don't have to (see: news).
It started with minor constitutional violations, like emoluments, and has ended with blatant ones, such as attacking birthright citizenship.
Interesting and high-quality comment.
>I think it’s a little early to call the end of the U.S. Constitution.
I totally disagree with this though. It is several generations late to start crying about the end of the US Constitution.
I basically agree with the rest of your comment though, especially the "don't tell me what to do" and the Presidential "honeymoon period".
I used to think the problem of governance by EO was getting worse too but the stats tell a different story:
https://www.statista.com/chart/7658/number-of-executive-orde...
Somehow "number of EOs" doesn't sound like the right metric to use when determining whether executive power is growing. Surely it's the content that matters.
FDR forced people to give up all their gold assets at a fixed rate, under threat of imprisonment for a decade. He then proceeded to nearly double the declared exhange rate up once the government had confiscated everybody's gold.
All done by executive order. Makes basically all modern EOs look pretty innocuous by comparison.
That said I actually agree and would love to see a sharp reduction in executive power, especially as it comes to using the military. If we're going to go bombing places, that should require a declaration of war from Congress. And 'emergency' powers should not be enabled for decades on end.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
FDR truly was the worst president we ever had. The more I learn about him, the more I wish we could roll back history to before his presidency.
Especially when there are EOs for naming post offices and other boring mechanical work of the executive.
It would take some serious effort (and there’d be disagreement) but maybe you could classify “important” government changes and if they were enacted by congress, EO, courts, etc.
Also, that link stops with Obama and that leaves out two whole administrations that would be pretty pertinent data in this discussion. Nearly a decade of data. It looks like Trump's first term had 220 and Biden had 162. It would be interesting to see the data classified the way you described and then broken down by party over time. The actual policymaking via EO by each party over the last 50 years would be more elucidating than the straight numbers for sure.
I’m open to that, but what context do you think is appropriate and how would you measure it for an unbiased metric?
The number of EOs is a poor measure of the extent of executive power. There are many other ways to concentrate executive power; for example OMB (part of the Executive Office of the President) issues “M-memos” (“M” for “management”) to the heads of all departments, instructing them on how to implement EOs, laws, and White House priorities.
There is a consensus among researchers of the workings of the US government and the legal context thereof that, since FDR and especially since Reagan, that the “imperial presidency” has been gaining ground.
Related to that, the first 100 days are typically when there is the highest number of orders per day. https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/politics/biden-exec...
Tump did 20% of his total, from the first term, in the first 100 days. Biden did just under 1/3 of his total in the first 100 days.
I agree with you that FDR was a turning point. Before that Lincoln was a major Executive expansion.
We have been beyond US Constitutional limitations for many lifetimes.
People ought to stop thinking everyone one else is playing 3D chess and just accept what is happening in front of their eyes.
I wouldn't call him genius, but maybe you're right.
Whoever got the idea of flooding the space with outrageous EOs is a genius. Certainly evil as well.
Pretty sure it’s the work of Stephen Miller - who is now his senior policy advisor.
8 years ago the Trump admin had no idea what to do. Now they’re prepared and much more dangerous.
Some things will be reversed in 4 years time and we can ride out the storm. but others - like renewed emphasis on fossil fuels to reward the big donors and have energy for AI - will have lasting effects on my children and their children — those make me truly furious.
> Some things will be reversed in 4 years
Or never. We should be prepared for Term 3 (which is already being floated) or a landslide GOP win in 2026, 2028, and beyond. Expect future Presidential elections to look like '86.
You all are openly admitting that these people are evil geniuses. Keep that in mind when thinking to the future. They are going to continue their evil genius behavior and it's going to keep working.
The word evil is a bit overused, but in the case of Stephen Miller it fits like a glove.
I’ve said since the beginning that that saving grace (if there is one) of Trump’s first term was that he was disorganized, and he surrounded himself with people who kept him in check to some degree. People who were willing to tell him that he couldn’t do certain things (prime example: White House legal counsel kept Trump from doing the crazy things that people like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell suggested after he lost the 2020 election).
He’s not going to make that mistake this time, and he’s putting people in power who will do what he wants without question. That’s the scary part of the next four years.
Agreed. Miller is evil. He was the architect of the policy of separating migrant families at the border to scare them into not crossing.
Why do people think there is some riding out this storm? I am curious, what do people mean by this?
I mean you just hunker down, stop reading the news, go about your life, and hope that the “storm” doesn’t do too much damage, and then work like hell in 4 years time to avoid a repeat (won’t be Trump but to prevent another fascist president, also you can bet that Trump will try for a 3 rd term on the basis that he didn’t serve 2 consecutive terms).
I think there are some active things you can do to help. Give money to legal groups challenging unconstitutional actions. Write to your various federal reps to let them know how you feel. Be kind and supportive to those being targeted by hate and bigotry.
We won't be riding out this storm if we all hunker down.
> Give money to legal groups challenging unconstitutional actions
Maybe work with possible candidates to flippable seats in state and federal levels.
Also, work on the politician acquisition pipeline - guiding promising ones to school boards, city council, and upwards.
The campaign for the next presidential election started the day after the last. The far-right got this and are actively working to discredit any possible competing candidate.
Right now is a great time for Dems to start working hard on taking back both houses. Start mapping districts that can be flipped, districts with low voter registration, and which messages they will bombard these people with.
Conservatives realized that they could effectively lock down Congress, take over the Supreme Court and then vest all power in the executive. The whole arguments against DEI, smaller governments etc are all a smoke screen because they have zero issues with nepotism and favoritism as long as it benefits them. And no issue with government overreach as long as they control it.
Unfortunately I think the only direction is balkanization of the states. And I don't think that is going to end well.
It may be easy to get mad as the Republicans for this, but there’s a clear bipartisan precedent here. Remember DACA? Might have been a good policy if Congress had enacted it. Bad precedent as an executive action though, because it establishes that the president’s ability to make immigration policy is effectively unlimited. Today’s ICE raids are made possible by DACA.
I wouldn't count the Executive Orders related to ICE in the "nepotism and favoritism" group fzeroracer referred to. Those might be more of the "smokescreen." The orders for mass layoffs or encouraging quitting of civil service seen more like the ulterior motive. Allowing the president to remove "disloyal" civil servants would take us back to the spoils system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system
Then, either they use existing executive power to ensure Republicans have an insurmountable advantage in national elections, or they haven't thought things through and we'll see even larger shifts in federal regulations after each administration change.
DACA certainly pushed the limits of executive authority, but...
Immigration raids are pretty clearly an executive function, and they happened prior to DACA and prior to ICE. Executive prioritization of federal law enforcement is normal and expected.
No, ICE was established in 2003, post-9/11, way before DACA in 2012, and it was always intended to be used for this purpose.
I think the OP has a different point. I don’t think they were claiming ICE was created by DACA, but rather their actions were enabled by it.
I'm not particularly going to disagree that the Dems are useless or not part of the problem, because they absolutely are. A lot of the issues we have is because of continued attempts at bipartisanship watering down bills into oblivion, means-testing and obsession with locking out people further left.
But ultimately a lot of our core foundational agencies have been functioning well regardless. And it's only the right that's intent on tearing them down no matter the consequences. So while the Dems enable this, the Republicans enact it.
What the Democratic party did to Sanders was a disgrace. The people wanted him, the powers-that-be (donors?) didn't. He'd probably have won against Trump, according to surveys.
The Republicans did go with the (sadly) popular guy. I guess he was palatable (by the definition that matters) because there was no talk of increasing taxes on high incomes.
> What the Democratic party did to Sanders was a disgrace. The people wanted him, the powers-that-be (donors?) didn't.
More people who voted wanted Clinton and Biden. Sanders himself admitted not enough young people voted and his platform was less popular in more conservative states.
AFAIU, there were party shenanigans to decrease his chances in the primary?
Very very minor party shenanigans. Serious enough that they should be called out and punished, but not serious enough to effect the voting.
"She wad given the questions tonthe debate," is the most serious accusation. But anyone with a dozen brain cells knows whats going to be asked during the debates.
I'm all for balkanization. It is better than the status quo.
Yea, looks like the US is going full on Russian mode here. I'm not all that disappointed in Trump himself, this was no surprise. I'm disappointed at the lack of meaningful opposition. Most of the republican part have fallen in line and the Dems aren't doing much.
Question here for this group. In this day of technology, information is power seems much more relevant. I don't have clear data, but it seems from observation and analysis by others social media played a pretty key role: "fake news", info bubbles, biasing your feeds etc. What are some ideas on reliable ways to provide access to accurate information?
We have pretty fixed red/blue blocks of states and Trump/MAGA has made the gap much wider.
In earlier years I would have been okay living in a red state - not my pref but no big deal. Now I’m no more willing to raise my kids in a deep red state than I am in Russia or China.
I agree with your broader point, but I really wish people wouldn't refer to MAGA Republicans as "conservative." Right-wing, or reactionary, certainly. But there's nothing "conservative" about undermining the rule of law and ignoring the Constitution.
By the same logic, I don't like calling far-left cancel culture "liberal." I'm afraid our partisanship has blinded us to genuine liberal and conservative virtues.
I also wouldn't label cancel culture as "far-left" because just as it isn't in any way "liberal", it isn't limited to those on the proverbial left of the spectrum. The mainstream language used to discuss politics simply lacks the ability to reflect the nuance needed in the 21st century. And that's not even getting into the discussion on what we call "cancel culture" because there is a big gulf between "that person said a thing that was a bit off" and "that person is a literal criminal/fascist" in my opinion.
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And thanks to Biden's final decisions, presidents and their entourage are effectively immune to prosecution. They just need to "pardon" their friends at the end of the administration. So there is really no limit to what Trump can do.
That's way older than Biden.
Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_Libby_clemency_controv... for example.
Hell, look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_Richard_Nixon
Yes, I know it existed. But democrats acted previously as this was a problem. Now they normalized it and both parties cannot complain anymore. The judiciary system was made completely toothless against a president and anyone he dims a friend.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_Affair#Pardons
Biden exercised the power that the Courts identifed for the President.
Still, it doesn't matter. Telling you, this is the one truth of our reality - the dems are always wrong.
Ehh… the Supreme Court actually did this for Trump. All “official” actions of the president are immune from prosecution.
Biden just acted on it.
> Biden just acted on it.
He could have done a lot better with that legal blanket.
Nothing evil about not wasting taxpayer money.
He banned politically incorrect research.
I'm old enough to remember when it was the right wing complaining about "political correctness gone mad".
I'm genuinely puzzled by people's reaction to DEI measures. In my experience, they have in many cases been explicitly exclusionary (e.g. a conference only for certain minorities, specific support preferences). I have never heard anyone criticize "outreach" in general. The problem starts when outreach means only targeting specific minorities.
Lots of politically charged comments on this discussion. If you disagree with NSF’s merit and broader impact review criteria, that’s fine and it’s important to have a healthy conversation about it, but I think it’s important to take a step back and thoughtfully address concrete ideas that are actually contained in the proposal review criteria.
These are the kinds of issues at stake in terms of the broader impacts criteria:
- Is it good that NSF promotes applications that include historically minority-serving institutions (as opposed to just the same few R1 universities)?
- should NSF prioritize proposals with strong scientific outreach activities aimed at boosting engagement and opportunities in under-represented demographics?
Keep in mind that NSF funding is extremely competitive. It’s not like subpar research is ubiquitously getting funded over better research with lower “broader impacts” scores. Successful proposals excel on both fronts.
1. There are thousands of universities in the US that are neither R1/R2 nor "historically minority serving". What about those universities?
2. Where did you get the idea that outreach is not still an important priority? The issue is what is euphemistically called "under-represented demographics" which we understand excludes many Americans on the basis of their race.
It is wild to pull already granted money. I meet so many scientists who just need $X to continue pursuing their research and it’s generally not a large sum. So this is incredibly disappointing for the research ecosystem which feeds the startup ecosystem. This hurts our competitiveness on the global stage and decreases our future quality of life.
another great reminder that if the money isn't in an account in your name that you fully control, you shouldn't count on it. have had to learn this the hard way myself.
They need arbitrary criteria on which to assess that money goes to the “right” group of people. Competitive awards already had a lot of arbitrary factors, this is yet another person to add to this, with a uniquely political perspective. Also if they don’t have to award the money it is likely they don’t.
For those of you who haven’t lived under an authoritarian regime, this is what it looks like (though it gets worse).
This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an authoritarian regime. Hysterical rhetoric doesn't help anything, it simply inflames tensions and perpetuates the cycle of politicians trying to hurt each other. We should all attempt to avoid it as much as possible.
The whole "loyalty purge" is very much a hallmark of an authoritarian regime, and Congress is just standing by.
Sure, it's not Russia or China, but it's certainly no model democracy. We're definitely heading down the path of authoritarianism / fascism.
Don't forget that 4 years ago there was an armed attempt to overturn the results of an election, spurred on by the losing president who also pressured officials to overturn the results. And then the same politician was given immunity by the justices who he appointed (if it had been any other court they would have been forced to recuse themselves from the case), leading to him being re-elected and then promptly pardoning those who attempted a coup. That's arguably the most anti-democracy event in the history of the US (or at least the last 100 years).
Then when that politician gets in power he starts an loyalty and ideological purge. That's exactly what authoritarian leaders do (and Xi in China did). So yes, we still have checks and balances and our system is not authoritarian, but Trump certainly is and is trying his hardest to centralize as much power and authority as possible in himself, which is again exactly what authoritarian leaders do. Lets call a spade a spade.
On the other hand....
I hate Trump as much as is humanly possible but DEI feels like using racism to fight racism.
Last week we have seen ai CEOs calling for sanctions because the Chinese publish open weights models and research, while the American companies don't. Then this naked politicization of science (which is also done pretty incompetently). This really feels like a paradigm shift.
Not only that. I've seen that some NSF-funded billion-sized projects are closing DEI channels in slack. The idiocy of the government is really limitless here.
Direct presidential decrees within control by the parliament were how Weimar fell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_48_(Weimar_Constitutio...
Just a note, this isn't just about DEI, it's about all things trump doesn't like it looks like. May be even solar power and windmills (that cause cancer, according to him).
So everything has to get reviewed, and people are speculating about what that might mean?
What a disaster the next four years are going to be. Just a matter of time before the orange baffoon outlaws grants that fund science research.
I'm confused - was the decision to "shut everything down" made by the Trump admin, or by NSF on their own? If it's the latter, is it actually necessary or are they overreacting on purpose?
I can’t sort of understand an EO stopping grants with “gender ideology” or “woke ideology (whatever that means, still unclear), but “green new deal”?!? So we a halt all research into clean energy or climate change and just hope co2 emissions drop by themselves? Fing idiots who are sacrificing our children’s future for the oil and gas lobbyists. This makes me very angry.
the overton window has a new view. According to the old direction, these subjects are 'not to be discussed in professional society', i.e. they are to be decided by government and are considered intellectually dirty. Under the new rules, anything goes and needs to be publicly debated in order to remove the previous biases.
Curious to see whether HN is also following suit in changing its window, like every other online medium seems to be doing.
I hope not; you can often see rightwing nonsense in threads, and lord knows I argue with them often enough, but it's not reached the Twitter point of total unusability yet and still manages to have interesting discussions sometimes.
I hope we can still hold discussions on "dirty" subjects in a dispassionate and objective way. Sadly, I see a lot of those typical short snarky comments now common in other online spaces.
Also, this IS an important discussion, for it's creating social transformation that might hinder our species' ability to solve the difficult challenges ahead.
It's the first time I'm seeing accessibility put under the same umbrella as DEI. Is "DEIA" in the executive order, or is NSF overreacting, or... is being disabled and wanting to have some quality of life "woke" now?
"DEIA" has picked up steam in government circles over the past few years, and made it into the executive order because of that. I don't think I'd ever seen it used by a non-governmental organization.
Accessibility has always been part of DEI. (Certainly it's been a repeated topic of conversation in my campus's Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board.) And yes, any effort that involves spending time or money to make sure that every person gets to "have some quality of life" falls under this same umbrella. That is literally what people are referring to when they call things "woke".
There is still a difference between actually doing hard work to help disadvantaged and marginalized folks and thinking that “being annoying about one’s pronouns” or “making lists of coworkers who are not woke enough” (both examples are quotes from self-proclaimed social justice activists) solves any problems.
However, thinking that this crop of politicians would take a nuanced stance on anything at all is idiocy at its purest.
Sure! There are always people out there who obsess over linguistic and behavioral purity, and they tend to be very loud. I'm not certain that I've ever met one of them in person. (I've certainly met people who might say (e.g.) "Here's why I've started including pronouns in my email sig," but I think that's not what you're talking about.)
If the current "anti-woke" movement were just about shutting down those obnoxious purists, I think it would be a lot less controversial. But from what I've seen, the political rhetoric (and the associated policy positions now being implemented) strikes just as hard or harder at the folks actually trying to do the hard work.
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I was not thinking about immigrating to the US, but this is making me reconsider. EU is circling the drain and the writing is on the wall. The project failed.
Let's not allow a minority to drag what can be a civil and objective discussion into a shouting match.
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@dang this is turning into flame throwing. Can we please kill the thread as there is nothing intellectually curious being discussed here.
This. There are like 3 or 4 comments that are worth reading right now.
OP here. Can we instead limit the visibility of the flamethrowers?