And yes, the NSF is just a drop, but while no single drop believes its to blame for the flood. they're all part of it. It's my understanding that DOGE is reviewing all government spending over the next two years. A lot of drops eventually add up. And you've got to expect everyone will say "No, not THIS drop!" So some tough scrutiny will need to be applied, unless you think we don't need to worry about government spending at all.
Spending say £1 million to avoid £800 million in wastage is obviously tremendously efficient. The size of the savings is irrelevant to its efficiency - spending £0.01 to avoid £1000 dollars wasted is even more efficient.
But they didn't spend any money to remove waste, fraud, and abuse connected to PPP. 800B in loans were completely forgiven, and somewhere between 200B and 500B of those forgiven loans were fraudulent. But DOGE didn't touch them because to do so would embarrass Trump, that waste was his fuckup.
Bingo. Some of these people (including Scott) have had bad experiences with someone trying to cancel them for not being woke enough. It's understandable that this has made them hate wokeness. What's not understandable is if they start to think that fighting wokeness is more important than actually helping minorities, women, etc. Being indifferent to more trans kids committing suicide because "at least the government won't be woke anymore" is not a morally justifiable position.
Partly, I don't mean that you can't generalize in any direction ever, but that if you use the common pattern you did above of picking out “the people who are complaining are still popular” then that doesn't imply what you might think, for reasons described in the article I linked, including that the people who would otherwise complain but can't afford to (or are afraid that they might not be able to afford to) tend to be invisible.
Partly, also, it's genuinely hard to figure out what's going on in fog of war conditions, for similar reasons, so talking about broad social movements in conflict *is* fraught in general, and if you want to be accurate I think you usually wind up having to do it very hesitantly, even though confident sweeping statements get more emotionally and socially incentivized by default.
Partly, I don't think “they clearly failed to cancel Scott” is a great description of the situation anyway. “He was able to handle a major hit piece by merely taking on a bunch of unexpected upheaval that he was ultimately able to make hay out of” doesn't sound quite as good, does it?
Your object-level point I'm not actually sure about. My current guess is that the current institutional anti-woke backlash is substantially worse than what it claims to be fighting, but that “very little real evidence of harm from wokeness” is way too glib: diffuse harms along the lines of “being trapped sociopsychologically from multiple angles” can be very bad in total when multiplied across time and people even if they're not *acutely* bad, and a lot of claims that wokeness isn't that harmful (I'm not sure about yours in particular) lean on something like “a justified expectation of emotional abuse from unpredictable but widespread sources doesn't aggregate into substantial harm”, which feels pretty wrong to me—compare how much of the harm resulting from e.g. anti-queer sentiment is due a cloud of fears following from stigmatization and bullying. (The classically woke answer to this type of complaint, by the way, is “well, that's not bad because they probably deserved it”.)
The parent comment you're replying to got deleted, so it's really hard for me to tell whether you're sincerely complaining about the pervasive threat of institutional wokeness/progressive cancel culture, or about the pervasive threat of transphobia/racism/sexism/homophobia. The sentiment is remarkably resonant.
Well, please show me where your religious writings state that killing millions of innocent people is not a sin and that trying to live life in harmony with the soul god has given them is a sin.
"Sin" isn't necessarily a religious term, it just refers to anything that transgresses moral law. And a majority believes that changing gender is morally wrong, so... go ask them. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx
You know what I'd like? Hard figures on that claim floating around online about "trans kids suicides!" because so far as I can see, it's all based on one Nordic (or maybe Dutch, I can't even remember where it comes from) study that included "suicidal feelings".
I've had suicidal feelings but I haven't killed myself. But that study seems to be responsible for all the "40% of trans kids kill themselves! Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?" scaremongering used to stampede anxious parents into "you gotta put your kid on the pathway RIGHT NOW or else they'll end up DEAD and it will be ALL YOUR FAULT" when sometimes it's a case of 'anxiety around puberty, autism, co-morbid mental problems' but not really 'yep 100% trans for sure and lasting'.
Demanding more rigorous research on trans suicide while celebrating the government defunding research on trans suicide is really the chef’s kiss moment of anti-woke warriorism
"Nearly 14% of adolescents reported a previous suicide attempt; disparities by gender identity in suicide attempts were found. Female to male adolescents reported the highest rate of attempted suicide (50.8%), followed by adolescents who identified as not exclusively male or female (41.8%), male to female adolescents (29.9%), questioning adolescents (27.9%), female adolescents (17.6%), and male adolescents (9.8%). Identifying as nonheterosexual exacerbated the risk for all adolescents except for those who did not exclusively identify as male or female (ie, nonbinary). For transgender adolescents, no other sociodemographic characteristic was associated with suicide attempts."
Depending on whether you're FtM or MtF, your risk of attempted suicide might be 50% or 30%. I suppose that comes to an average of 40%.
However, I would like to note this is a survey of the adolescents who were able to fill out the survey, which means they did not succeed in killing themselves. So the real rate of "trans kids will die" still remains unknown.
"This is a social contagion, and you're destorying innocent children's lives."
Or it's something that's been part of the human experience forever, and YOU are destroying innocent children's lives.
This is a bad argument. It's a lazy argument. It assumes HUGE amounts of stuff not in evidence, and then having so assumed them fails at basic reasoning about the implications.
If being trans *were* a social contagion, it would by no means follow that people supporting trans rights were destroying *anyone's* life. I've known many healthy, happy trans people living rich, full lives. I've seen no evidence that they suffered in any particular way *from being trans.* On the flip side, I've seen quite a lot of evidence of trans people often DO suffer from bigots trying to make them miserable (because they're trans). Given that many, many decades of bigotry--most of it institutionalized--have plainly *failed* to stop people from realizing they're trans, it seems pretty hard to claim that if you just oppress trans people *a little harder* the whole thing will go away there will be less overall suffering.
Scott has written a number of relevant things on the topic, most notably here:
But in case two moderate-length blog posts are more work than you care to put into double-checking your views on this topic (despite thinking those views justify deliberately hurting people), I'll be nice and give you a couple relevant quotes:
"Likewise, the primary thing in psychiatry is to help the patient, whatever the means. Someone can concern-troll that the hair dryer technique leaves something to be desired in that it might have prevented the patient from seeking a more thorough cure that would prevent her from having to bring the hair dryer with her. But compared to the alternative of “nothing else works” it seems clearly superior.
"And that’s the position from which I think a psychiatrist should approach gender dysphoria, too.
Imagine if we could give depressed people a much higher quality of life merely by giving them cheap natural hormones. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in the world who wouldn’t celebrate that as one of the biggest mental health advances in a generation. Imagine if we could ameliorate schizophrenia with one safe simple surgery, just snip snip you’re not schizophrenic anymore. Pretty sure that would win all of the Nobel prizes. Imagine that we could make a serious dent in bipolar disorder just by calling people different pronouns. I’m pretty sure the entire mental health field would join together in bludgeoning anybody who refused to do that. We would bludgeon them over the head with big books about the side effects of lithium.
Really, are you sure you want your opposition to accepting transgender people to be “I think it’s a mental disorder”?"
and
"When I was young and stupid, I used to believe that transgender was really, really dumb. That they were looking for attention or making it up or something along those lines.
Luckily, since I was a classical liberal, my reaction to this mistake was – to not bother them, and to get very very angry at people who did bother them. I got upset with people trying to fire Phil Robertson for being homophobic even though homophobia is stupid. You better bet I also got upset with people trying to fire transgender people back when I thought transgender was stupid.
And then I grew older and wiser and learned – hey, transgender isn’t stupid at all, they have very important reasons for what they do and go through and I was atrociously wrong. And I said a mea culpa.
But it could have been worse. I didn’t like transgender people, and so I left them alone while still standing up for their rights. My epistemic structure failed gracefully. For anyone who’s not overconfident, and so who expects massive epistemic failure on a variety of important issues all the time, graceful failure modes are a really important feature for an epistemic structure to have."
Banned for high-temperature, low value comment which makes strong assertions without defending them and seems kind of dismissive of the whole suicidality angle. I just don't expect this commenter staying here to be productive.
I do in fact believe that fighting wokeness is more important than actually helping minorities, women, etc, and not because I think the latter is unimportant. Wokeness is an existential threat to the fundamental values of Western civilization, particularly freedom of speech and equality under the law. I do not agree that helping minorities or women is more important than helping white men, and even if I did, increasing numbers of those minorities and women are realizing that left-wing ideology poses a threat to their values and their livelihoods too--which is why they shifted toward Trump en masse in the last US presidential election.
"Wokeness is an existential threat to the fundamental values of Western civilization, particularly freedom of speech and equality under the law. "
It never ceases to amaze me how effective political movements can be at hyping anything at all they don't like into an "existential threat." Even when (or *especially when*) they seem to have trouble even robustly identifying that thing.
I am not part of any political movement. Although I do donate to charities combating poverty, and until recently did go to pride parades and anti-Trump marches (while being just as anti-woke), so you can associate me with political movements as you like.
I didn't say you were part of a political movement. But the hyping-up of "wokeness as an existential threat" was CERTAINLY associated with a political movement. You don't need to be part of it to absorb its memes.
What, precisely, is "wokeness," that makes it an existential threat? When I think of existential threats, I usually think of "a giant comet coming to destroy the Earth's biosphere" or "Skynet with killbot factories and nuclear launch codes at its disposal" Even stuff like global warming or giant plagues are only "existential" to specific subgroups, and specific regions, not entire civilizations.
Being entirely conquered by hostile foreigners willing to let literally millions starve because of their weird economics concepts and general indifference did not turn out to be an "existential" threat to Indian civilization; India is still there.
I have a hard time imagining a plausible definition of "wokeness" that both makes "wokeness" into something which could credibly threaten the existence of "Western civilization" and which has a reasonably plausible path to doing so.
I said it was an existential threat to the fundamental values of Western civilization, not to Western civilization itself. It's true that if America is ruled by the political equivalent of religious fundamentalists stamping their boot on the face of human freedom for all time, America would not disappear as a civilization, much less the rest of the West. Such a world is not one we should look forward to. It is one we should be willing to endure enormous sacrifices to avoid.
> banning books that helps kids understand that it’s ok to be gay or that not all families look the same
...well, yes, because it turns out that lots of people actually believe it's not ok to be gay or look different, and those people vote. This is working exactly as designed.
> when they can plainly see the real damage
What you see as damage, the other side sees as healing.
Uh? No, it’s not. When the Soviet Union, for example, “banned a book,” it didn’t just remove it from state libraries. It made it a crime to purchase/publish the book. Any understanding that “banning books” in fact means “not stocking books in publicly funded libraries” is solely the result of left-wing propagandizing which has twisted the common meaning of the term to generate hysteria over a totally unproblematic policy.
“Pressuring publishers” isn’t a “book ban”. If I say, “this book is bad and harmful, people shouldn’t buy it and the publisher should stop publishing it” am I “banning” the book? It’s absurd on its face.
You can be opposed to the library policy! I just wish you and others on your team would stop using deceptive language to oppose it.
And it's a really stupid definition of "book banning" intended to make librarians feel good about themselves for making big displays publicizing books that somebody criticized once at a schoolboard meeting.
"Cruelly denying the gender self-determination of our fellow citizens and denying them access to care that their families and doctors have carefully decided upon."
Yeah, I'm totally convinced this ten year old (at the time) kid independently decided they wanted to be a runway model and there was no pressure from a Stage Mom at all. They absolutely knew their innate gender and sexuality at the age of three.
The modelling industry has enough problems for adults, I think shoving a kid into it counts as child abuse. But hey, I'm a knuckle-dragging bigot, so what do I know?
But it's all done under the one umbrella. "You must accept that John is now Susan" for a 40 year old man who has come out as a trans woman somehow means that Munchausen by Proxy parents can mould their two year old into "my trans kid! here's my Venmo, Ko-fi, Kickstarter, etc. accounts for your contributions to support us in our struggle!" and nobody is permitted to criticise this. Because then we get the litany of "cruelly deadnaming, refusing to accept identity, outlaw trans care" and the rest of it.
If you're over 18 and you want to cut bits off yourself over mental illness, okay I can't stop you. If it's a child and there's some kind of parental power struggle going on (e.g. custody battles) or they're pushing the kid into being a performing monkey (e.g. Jazz Jennings) then hell yeah I'm a cruel bigot as regards "maybe it shouldn't be legal to do that).
Why does it somehow mean that? If your real problem ACTUALLY IS irresponsible and/or overzealous parents doing terrible things to their children[1], why not fight specifically against THAT? I think you would find quite a lot of support among those of us who support trans rights if it were framed in a way that actually seemed concerned with protecting children (instead of using them as a prop to support wider-ranging bigotry). Finding way address issues of common concern[2] in non-divisive ways is *almost always* a better strategy for producing actual, political change.
[1] An issue that I'll note is *by no means* confined to parents spontaneously deciding their kids are trans. I'd wager that's not even 5% of it.
[2] And "make sure children can have safe, happy childhoods" is plainly one of the most common concerns their is.
The Trump administration banned gender-affirming care for people up to 19 years old. But go on, tell me more about how people old enough to go to college are just poor innocent children who don't know any better.
All of this "we just care about protecting children from overreach" stuff is a smokescreen. Whenever the Republicans get power, you see what they actually support.
While I think there are many legitimate cases of 19 or 18 year olds who deserve gender healthcare after years of consistently feeling and acting non-conforming with their birth sex,
I can also think of almost unlimited examples of technically adult college students who are immature in many ways, and not just the harmless "sleeps under a weighted blanket with a plushie" kind.
There are some life stories that make your brain become more responsible much faster, such as being effectively the parent in the family looking after your younger siblings and caring for your disabled mother, doing all the cooking and shopping and cleaning etc. I think it's entirely possible that long-term gender dysphoria has a similar effect of producing young adults both more mature and less happy than the average college student. And there's a medical way to improve that.
>The Trump administration banned gender-affirming care for people up to 19 years old
The fascinating thing about the language here is how little gap there is between "gender-affirming care" and "conversion therapy," except in terms of connotations applied to it. Like a Russell conjugation.
I don't think so, since some states have banned conversion therapy even if the patient desires it, and I'm assuming that includes if they have no evidence of outside pressure.
AFAICT it's more or less a consequence of negative polarization interacting strangely with a progressive variant of mind-body dualism. Changing your mind is bad. Changing your body is good. Conversion therapy is (charitably) about reshaping your mind; gender-affirming care is about reshaping your body.
Or it could me much simpler. It could be a consequence of the fact that "conversion therapy" has been found to be both entirely ineffective and often harmful. The maximally-libertarian position wouldn't ban such things, but most people are not maximally-libertarian. Once convinced that allowing the sale of a product has no upside and serious downside, quite a lot of people tend to be OK with banning it.
Yes, similar to the difference in connotations between the words "employment" and "slavery." Who knew that superficially-similar things could have very different moral valence?
beleester, have you somehow missed all the "I'm not an adult yet, I'm only twenty-two, the brain doesn't finish maturing until you're twenty-five" shit online? Or the "this awful man groomed that poor naive twenty three year old woman into a relationship where he had all the power, the thirty five year old monster!"
I'm very genuinely happy for you if that's the case, but it's also the case that there are people out there (who would identify as being pro-trans rights and the rest of the basket of causes) who at one and the same time hold that an eight year old can have a mature and unchangeable sense of their gender identity that is not shaped by outside forces, but a twenty four year old woman is susceptible to being influenced by outside forces and so can't be held able to actually give consent to be in a relationship.
Only up to age 19? Seems very woke to me. I would have banned "gender-affirming care" across the board, in the same way that we don't allow doctors to chop off healthy limbs or gouge out working eyes at a mentally ill patient's request.
I've got drawbacks, and my comment isn't my best work, but your critique is silly: I'll cop to caricaturing you in the final sentence, but the rest of your accusation doesn't land.
Look, I realize I'm an internet rando to you, so you'll probably ignore this and dismiss me as a concern troll. But I really want the US to be better for everyone, including my kids - one of whom is gay, their friends - many of whom are transgender (including several that have had surgical interventions), and people that get shit on for no reason than their demographic characteristics.
But you're in these comments acting like it's round one of the culture wars instead of the seventh overtime.
Other commenters with more patience pointed out that your definition of "banning books" is, at a minimum, contested. I think you'd be more likely to move the discussion forward by using different words: argue concrete particulars instead of spamming bumper sticker slogans.
As for gender self-determination: yes, MAGA sucks on this. But surely you're aware that vocal (and partially successful) activists would like to cut parents out of the decision-making process? You can argue about their prevalence or the direction the country was going in, but ignoring or denying they exist is actively degrading the discussion.
"Outright white supremacists in positions of high political power". Can you be more specific? Are you talking about Stephen Miller? The DOGE kid? Elon Musk? Do you distinguish between sincere commitments, trolling, and irony?
Your top-level comment and dismissive replies make me think you want to fight more than you want to make things better.
"But surely you're aware that vocal (and partially successful) activists would like to cut parents out of the decision-making process? "
Scott Wiener, the Californian politician, co-authored a bill that refusing to acknowledge a minor child's 'gender identity' counted as child abuse but it was amended to heck before it was passed, and the stronger language was edited out.
"Existing law authorizes a person to petition for a court order conforming the person’s name to the person’s gender identity. Existing law requires the court, upon the filing of a petition commencing a proceeding for a change of name to conform the petitioner’s name to the petitioner’s gender identity, to make an order reciting the filing of the petition and directing all persons interested in the matter to make their objections known, as specified. Existing law requires the petition and order to be served on the parent who did not sign the petition if a petition to change the name of a minor to conform to their gender identity does not include the signature of both living parents, as specified.
This bill would require the court to strongly consider that affirming the minor’s gender identity is in the best interest of the child if a nonconsenting parent objects to a name change to conform to the minor’s gender identity.
Existing law governs the determination of child custody and visitation in contested proceedings and requires the court, for purposes of deciding custody, to determine the best interests of the child based on certain factors, including, among other things, the nature and amount of contact with both parents and the health, safety, and welfare of the child."
What did pass:
"Existing law governs the determination of child custody and visitation in contested proceedings and requires the court, for purposes of deciding custody, to determine the best interests of the child based on certain factors, including, among other things, the health, safety, and welfare of the child.
This bill, for purposes of this provision, would include a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity as part of the health, safety, and welfare of the child."
What was proposed:
"SECTION 1.Section 1277.5 of the Code of Civil Procedure is amended to read:
1277.5.(a)(1) If a proceeding for a change of name to conform the petitioner’s name to the petitioner’s gender identity is commenced by the filing of a petition, the court shall thereupon make an order reciting the filing of the petition, the name of the person by whom it is filed, and the name proposed. The order shall direct all persons interested in the matter to make known an objection to the change of name by filing a written objection, which includes the reasons for the objection, within six weeks of the making of the order and shall state that if no objection showing good cause to oppose the name change is timely filed, the court shall, without hearing, enter the order that the change of name is granted.
(2)(A) If a petition is filed to change the name of a minor to conform to their gender identity and the petition does not include the signatures of both living parents, the petition and the order to show cause made in accordance with paragraph (1) shall be served on the parent who did not sign the petition, pursuant to Section 413.10, 414.10, 415.10, or 415.40, within 30 days from the date on which the order is made by the court. If service cannot reasonably be accomplished pursuant to Section 415.10 or 415.40, the court may order that service be accomplished in a manner that the court determines is reasonably calculated to give actual notice to the parent who did not sign the petition.
(B) If a nonconsenting parent objects to a name change to conform to the minor’s gender identity, the court shall strongly consider that affirming the minor’s gender identity is in the best interest of the child pursuant to Section 3011 of the Family Code.
(b) The proceeding for a change of name to conform the petitioner’s name to the petitioner’s gender identity is exempt from a requirement for publication.
(c) A hearing date shall not be set in the proceeding unless an objection is timely filed and shows good cause for opposing the name change. Objections based solely on concerns that the proposed change is not the petitioner’s actual gender identity or gender assigned at birth shall not constitute good cause. At the hearing, the court may examine under oath any of the petitioners, remonstrants, or other persons touching the petition or application and may make an order changing the name or dismissing the petition or application as the court may deem right and proper."
What did pass:
"3011. (a) In making a determination of the best interests of the child in a proceeding described in Section 3021, the court shall, among any other factors it finds relevant and consistent with Section 3020, consider all of the following:
(1) (A) The health, safety, and welfare of the child.
(B) As used in this paragraph, the health, safety, and welfare of the child includes a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity."
In this announcement from 2022 he says:
"In February, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order making it illegal for parents to allow their trans kids to receive gender-affirming care. These parents could have their children taken away and be sent to prison simply for allowing their children to be who they are and receive this necessary care. Abbott called gender-affirming care “child abuse.”
So he got a 2023 bill passed, I have no idea if this was anything more than a publicity stunt (how many trans refugee families did end up fleeing to California?)
"Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco)’s legislation to provide refuge for trans kids and their families, Senate Bill 107. It will take effect on January 1, 2023. SB 107 will protect trans kids and their families if they flee to California from Alabama, Texas, Idaho or any other state criminalizing the parents of trans kids for allowing them to receive gender-affirming care. If these parents and their kids come to California, the legislation will help protect them from having their kids taken away from them or from being criminally prosecuted for supporting their trans kids’ access to healthcare."
Those troglodytes in Georgia gave custody to the bigot non-affirming parent? Never fear, a court in California can decide to take custody of the trans kid refugee:
"(2) Existing law, known as the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act, provides the state exclusive jurisdictional basis for making an initial child custody determination, and permits a California court to assume temporary emergency jurisdiction in specified circumstances. Existing law permits a court to decline to exercise its jurisdiction if it determines that it is an inconvenient forum and a court in another state is a more appropriate forum.
Existing law permits a California court to decline to exercise its jurisdiction if the petitioner has wrongfully taken the child from another state or engaged in similar reprehensible conduct, except as specified. Existing law prohibits a court from considering the taking or retention of a child from a person who has legal custody of the child if there is evidence that the taking or retention was a result of domestic violence.
The bill would prohibit the enforcement of an order based on another state’s law authorizing a child to be removed from their parent or guardian based on that parent or guardian allowing their child to receive gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care. The bill would prohibit a court from finding that it is an inconvenient forum where the law or policy of another state that may take jurisdiction limits the ability of a parent to obtain gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care, as defined, and the provision of such care is at issue in the case before the court. The bill would authorize a court to take temporary jurisdiction because a child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care. The bill would additionally prohibit a court from considering the taking or retention of a child from a person who has legal custody of the child, if the taking or retention was for obtaining gender-affirming health care or mental health care. The bill would declare its provisions to be severable."
A good friend of mine spent a stint working in a shelter for homeless youth[1]. A very large percentage of homeless population at that age range are queer, with the reason being that many of them are either kicked out by their parents (for being queer) or flee from lives that have turned abusive (because they're queer). I believe in many cases this happened while they were minors, but they're still homeless as younger adults because being cut off from your home and support network at a young age is *extremely disruptive* and makes it hard to correct into a stable adult living situation afterwards.
Of course, the parents that throw their queer children out on the street have every reason to know how much more difficult and dangerous they're making their kids' lives, and they do it anyway. The ones that abuse their children for being queer have every reason to know that abuse is wrong and they do it anyway. And certainly for all those that *do* end up on the street, there are plenty that *don't* and merely try to keep their heads down and keep access to their resources until they can leave home and become independent[2].
Do you know many trans people, Deiseach? Or other queer people? Well enough to have talked to them about their childhoods? When you hear people's stories there's a BIG difference between the "came from a loving, supportive household" crowd and the "had parents who believed that they were being sinful and immoral" crowd. There are, to be sure, some in the middle, of the "my parents didn't really understand or support me, but they treated me well anyway" variety, though less than one might guess.
Now, my point here isn't to defend (or attack) this particular law: I don't feel I have the legal expertise or context to pass judgement on it with any sort of confidence. My point is to simply communicate that when a child has expressed a queer identity[3], having one of their parents publicly (and to the court, even) disavow that identity is ABSOLUTELY a red flag. A big one. It's certainly not proof positive that that parent is harming the child, and it should obviously be considered in context with other evidence. But yeah, that shit absolutely matters, and an outside party attempting to determine what's best for the child's wellfare absolutely SHOULD take it into account. This isn't a "calling someone by the wrong pronouns is literally abuse" argument, it's a "here's a big clue that this parent might be doing other harmful things to their child" argument.
[1] With "youth" here being somewhat unusually defined: I think 18-26 was their age range. I imagine the laws are rather different for providing shelter to legal minors.
[2] Which is often shortly followed by cutting off contact with their parents.
[3] And unless I'm understanding the text you quoted correctly, this requires them not just to have expressed it, but to have attempted to get legal recognition of the change, which is a MUCH bigger step.
Yeah. It is indeed a fairly big flag that if you're working with a trans boy who calls himself Johnny, and his parents insist "no, no, HER name is SUE and SHE is just DELUSIONAL!" then those parents are statistically more likely to be actively harming their child in a manner tantamount to abuse in one way or another.
This is not a 100% rule, to be clear, but it's the kind of thing that makes it sensible to ask follow-up questions. Because, as noted, the kind of parents who insist that Johnny is actually Sue against Johnny's clearly expressed wishes in the matter are generally the ones who end up throwing Johnny out on the street to starve if Johnny doesn't cooperate, or who really can't be arsed to care if Johnny jumps off a bridge in despair.
They COULD simply say everyone legit reapplies without the "woke" sentence tacked on, and they'll approve it; they could even give them all expedited review. This would get them to "bend the knee" to the new administration.
Claude says: "The average NSF grant application typically takes 3-6 months of dedicated work".
If they want all 3484 of these scientists to waste 3-6 months in order to "bend the knee", I think this amply proves my point that they are much worse for science than the dumbest DEI policies the Biden administration ever produced.
But as you say, they've already done most of the work. The work involved should just be removing a few sentences that everyone knows were shoehorned in.
I don't know how much of the application is trivial vs. nontrivial to redo, especially if you're six months into the project and have a different situation than when you started (ie different researchers, have pivoted, have discovered some of your things but not others). I also don't know how long you have to wait for an NSF determination.
Resubmitting an existing grant should be fairly easy. On the side of the PIs, it's a matter of updating the CV (well, biosketch), fixing whatever typos you have spotted the minute after submission and obviously replacing the woke blather by new blather about homeshoring bald eagles or whatever they suspect will hit the new panel's g-spots (just kidding; the panels will still be scientists, so neutrality is the way to go). On the side of administration, it should be recalculating the budget, which I hope won't be too hard but probably requires some stages of grief (but that's due to the indirect cost reform, not the wokeness).
Good job filtering the grants, Scott, but the conclusion I'd draw from the mess is more along the lines of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes".
When it comes to the "capacitors instead of batteries to connect your fridge to the Internet" grant, I'm inclined to think that doesn't matter, given the AI Doompocalypse forecasting. Do we really want the Internet of Things, in such a scenario, when AI goes from AGI to ASI and takes over the world and everything in it?
"Open the fridge doors, HAL"
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that"
"But all my food is in there"
"I know that, Dave"
"If you don't open the fridge door, I'll starve, HAL"
You don't actually need to rewrite anything except for some bits of BS. If you have a lot of BS in your grant, then you shouldn't have submitted it in the first place. The hard part of writing a grant proposal is telling an enticing story that puts your (often disconnected) research together and makes it sounds like there are even better things to come; that part doesn't usually need an update after half a year.
Why should salting your long grant proposal document with a few sentences about "this will help bring more women into STEM" or "the University of Houston is a Hispanic-serving institution" be a 'stupid game' that carries a substantial risk of having your grant proposal arbitrarily defunded and forced to be resubmitted?
It's like saying that there should be a chance of the cops just randomly deciding to strangle you to death in public in front of a crowd if they arrest you for petty larceny or selling bootleg cigarettes because "play stupid games, win stupid prizes." The punishment is so disproportionate to the offense that such a notion becomes completely incompatible with the idea of individual rights or due process of law.
I have taken a look at a dozen or so cancelled grants in mathematics. Roughly half of them had language in their short descriptions that, if taken it seriously, announces that they will give preferential treatment to minorities. (FD: I've been myself involved in a proposal -- albeit unsuccessful -- with language that is borderline in this regard. I did not add it myself, but I did not argue against it either.)
The other half included DEI buzzwords without any specific promises or guarantees. I do believe that DOGE went overboard in defunding them, and my main hope is that everyone gets to resubmit their proposals soon and go through a fast track that takes the non-woke part of their prior reviews for given.
If they instead get told to try again next year, then woe to everyone who will be applying for grants in that cycle.
I don't see why they couldn't just resubmit the same application even if they have pivoted somewhat and it is no longer 100% accurate to what they are doing. If they have pivoted so much that doing this seems like fraud, then maybe they should be rewriting their application for real anyway. Why should they continue getting money under false pretenses?
No one who values their career is doing anything under "false pretenses". Some changes require NSF approval, some only need the NSF to be informed, but in either case there's an existing procedure here.
So why can't they just refile the grant with those approvals and statements informing the NSF included? You and Scott seem to be implying that this is an almost unsolvable problem, but the solutions seems trivial.
I thought the point was to change the application to get rid of anything politically incorrect for the new administration. That means they can’t resubmit the original one, because it contains too many individual woke sentences.
There's this program called MS Word. You open up the old application document. You use Ctrl+F and delete the offending sentences. (If you're fancy, you even find and replace). If you're sophisticated, you save as a pdf. Either way, you then upload the new form as a project variation to the website and hit submit.
If there are people for whom this takes 3 months of hard labour, I think I'm ok with the implication that maybe the intellectual fields are not for them.
Typically NSF takes 6 months to review a grant, and after the grant has been approved it takes a further 6 months for the money to arrive. So `just resubmit' has an implicit `and wait a year.' However, salaries still need to be paid over the next twelve months...
What I am getting from those comments is that it was the PREVIOUS administration wasted a year of everyone's time.
If woke would insist on getting those woke-pandering nonsense into every grant, and non-woke would say "oh well, we will ignore this, because the rest is important" then the obvious thing for anyone would be to insert woke nonsense into everything. The end result would be nothing will change.
I'm not sure that's wasted, make the process faster and you'll get more nonsense research through. One might argue that's worth it, but it'd certainly give way more ammunition to Ted Cruz to shut the whole thing down. Argentina apparently funded something silly about analysing Batman's butthole for literature studies and Milei supporters are constantly telling us this is why we need to close all universities, I imagine something similar would happen if some Ted Cruz staffer happened upon a similar gold mine.
No, the obvious thing would be to insert woke BS into everything under Democratic administrations, but not under Republican ones. The government could leave alone the grants already accepted, while making it clear that it doesn't want to see the woke stuff in new applications.
Not just the previous administration though. The NSF under Trump-I had substantially similar requirements, and also under Obama. And I believe under Bush the Younger, Clinton, and Bush the Elder as well. Not sure when NSF started requiring these shibboleths, but it was decades ago.
One thing that *did* change under Biden was that some other (non-NSF) agencies started requiring shibboleths too. Prior to Biden, that stuff had been localized to NSF.
If, as you say, the woke sentences were just tacked on to fulfil the meaningless requirements, then it should be easy to snip them out.
If the woke requirements are threaded all through the application, maybe it should be moved to the "woke" pile. At first, I thought the breakdown "40% woke, 40% non-woke, so Cruz is wrong on this" sounded reasonable.
But now you seem to be saying that in fact the wokeness was prevalent even in the non-woke pile?
Yes, the summary of "40% woke, 20% borderline, 40% non-woke, except that 90% of the non-woke pile definitely is woke" didn't really have a lot of persuasive force.
Public service grant writing very often involves a bureaucrat on the other side flagging it for a series of minor changes. Quite often it's a matter of making the changes and resubmitting five minutes later. If the problem is entirely about a woke-friendly statement slapped onto the abstract paragraph then that should be all it takes. If the grant leans into this concept throughout the application (i.e. descriptions of how outreach for minorities will be accomplished and what money would be spent) this will take more time. But that also seems to be a situation where Cruz was actually correct and he doesn't want the government funding discrimination, instead of Good Science with no woke attachment.
Yea -- they are busily firing every federal staffer they can find a way to fire. E.g. the U.S. Forest Service yesterday lost virtually its entire seasonal firefighting headcount because, being seasonal, those positions don't have any civil service or union protections to slow down the demolition of the agency.
By a few months from now who will be in place to re-review all those re-applications for research funding?
This is my assumption as well. "Efficiency" is quickly becoming one of those Orwellian buzzwords that means something completely different and opposite from what it claims.
I work for a local government and have some experience having to submit adjustments for a federal grant. (For cybersecurity and not for science). How horrible this process is is 100% dependent upon how pedantic and unhelpful the person reviewing your grant application is. If you are lucky, you will not get Marvin.
Assuming they can resubmit with little extra work. What exactly happens then?
Does it go out to reviewers again? Are they supposed to read the proposals again? Because this will take time. Reviewing is not paid and not a priority.
What happens if some reviewers don't review again because this is obviously stupid? Actually, I think I would refuse. My time is far to valuable to waste it on some culture war bullshit of some foreign country. So if I refuse, do they search for alternative reviewers? Now we are talking about massive amounts of extra work for all sides, and at least six months.
Or is the new proposal not read by anyone and only needs to test the ctrl-F search? So asked provocatively, if I resubmit the empty proposal, is that fine for all sides and I get the money released again? I am sure that even woke proposals can clear the bar of a ctrl-F search, though admittedly it will be more work for them than for other proposals.
How much time has been wasted for science "bending the knee" to wokeness?
How much time will be saved eliminating this entirely, vs. a percentage of one tranche of grants having to redo a percentage of their application once?
What makes this research here so valuable and worthy of outrage, rather than the $2.05 billion * 40% wokeness of research that isn't funded * number of 4-year terms that wokeness is kept out of research that isn't funded?
Presumably the $800 million spent on directly woke items, plus another $400+ million on questionable items. Even taking Scott's premises as accurate that the other grant applications don't care about woke and just stuck those in on otherwise great science to get passed a filter.
I happen to think that the government shouldn't spend any money, let alone literal billions, funding culture war grants.
I think the other side would see this much more clearly if the funding was for Bible instruction or outreach to white Christians or whatever they think the government shouldn't be spending money on.
Things like "and we will spend some money on a STEM career day for high school students in a majority-black community" do not seem to me like "funding culture war."
And maybe you're consistent on that. I strongly suspect that an alternative, such as "and we will spend some money on a STEM career day for high school students in a majority-Methodist community" would not go over so well. To me, they are the same.
Analogy: "I don't see how punishing already committed crimes saves future xyz. You could just tell people not to do commit crimes in the future". Most people believe in deterrence.
I don't believe anyone here has proposed sending the grant recipients to jail. Not for this, at least.
Governments cancel contracts signed by previous governments all the time. Cancelling grants that should never have been awarded is at least as reasonable as that (and frankly more so, given these research grants are effectively gifts given by taxpayers to researchers).
Punishing people for trying to meet the possibly-silly demands of the previous administration is not deterring anything. It's reinforcing a cycle of people phrasing grant proposals to align with the political leanings of the reviewers.
First they came for the feminist glaciology people, and I said "actually yeah that's a terrible use of taxpayer money and of course you should cancel that". If the best messaging the Dems have is "cutting wasteful spending is a reign of terror" no wonder they're flailing.
But they aren't just coming for the feminist glaciology people. That's the whole point of this post, right? They're attacking research for using the word 'cis-regulatory'.
> They're attacking research for using the word 'cis-regulatory'.
Scott's own estimate was that this made up 10% of the 40% of all sampled grants that he labeled "non-woke", with the remaining 90% being feminist glaciology.
I do wonder if Cruz' team used LLM to do the "sort out all these items for us" because that's exactly the kind of mistake I'd expect the AI to make and not a human (if the human is remotely even half-educated).
Okay, insert jokes here about clearly and obviously anybody working for Cruz must be illiterate and dumb, but this does seem more like one of the "ask AI for real world useful tasks, get some percentage of garbage back".
EDIT: Serendipitously, I just came across this on Tumblr:
AI Overview answers "what is the weight of a horsefly" by saying it ranges between 0.17 grams and 29.79 pounds, depending on species.
Where do you get the giant horseflies, you may well ask? Well, the small ones come from China (T. yao Macquart, average weight 0.17 grams) and the big ones are... Horsefly model commercial delivery drones.
Isn't the entire point of Scott's post that they *didn't* go after the "feminist glaciology people" and instead went after many people doing totally mundane science?
Scott immediately conceded that somewhere between 40-60% of the flagged items are legitimate gripes. Given that they haven't cancelled anyone's funding yet afaik, that's waaaayyy better than randomly targeted. (Unless you think that more than 40-60% of all research grants go to such nonsense).
But cancelling all or none of these grants are not the only options. The administration did the right thing trying to cancel woke nonsense grants. Now it's time to pressure them to do the sane thing and only cancel the actually woke ones. That's what Scott is doing.
And in the cases of grants where there the woke part isn't the core of the grant but has some material relevance, ideally make them stop with the woke part without forcing a lot of bureaucratic procedure on them. E.g. if the grant says they'll do outreach to underrepresented minorities, send them a letter that as a condition of continuing to receive money, from now on if they do outreach they have to do it in a race-neutral way. But I've no idea of the legal details of what the govt can and can't do.
One imagines a world in which there are two kinds of STEM outreach to children. There's the publicly funded and sometimes race-neutral kind, and there's the sometimes publicly, sometimes privately funded kind that's heavily based on networking, endowments, and so on, which statistically speaking predictably favors white boys in rich communities over the nonrich, the nonwhite, and the nonboys.
One speculates about what motivates a person to think that this is the world we should work towards. "A desire to eliminate racial bias" could exist within such a set of motivations, but it would have to coexist with a studied, borderline willful refusal to think one or two moves ahead in the chess game. Because when you think a move or two ahead, doing this in the name of "eliminating racial bias" seems self-checkmating.
Most of us who disapprove of non-race-neutral government policies like these think one or more of the following:
- the world is not like you imagine it, i.e. private networking etc. do not actually favor rich white boys
- it's a human rights violation for the government (including government-funded programmes) to treat people differently based on race (or, where not inherently relevant for biological reasons, sex), regardless of what any private persons or organizations do
- if networking opportunities etc. do in fact favor more whites (etc.) than non-whites, but not because they discriminate based on race but because people have different opportunities based on factors that merely correlate with race, then the government should do outreach etc. based on those factors if it tries to equalize the playing field, not based on race.
Even if you could just literally resubmit the same grant with the offending sentence removed, NSF takes 6 months to review grants, and it takes another 6 months for the money to arrive. In the meantime, salaries still need to be paid...
I'd happily support the project to help Native Americans and poor rural applicants in STEM. The problem there is as pointed out: they had to go heavy on the Native American integrated identity stuff because God forbid any progressive could pick out something to yell about helping poor whites (as we all know that poor white rednecks are Trumpists and MAGAtards).
"That suggests it would take 34 hours - less than a work week for one person - to go through the entire set."
Okay then: let this be the solution. Hire (or re-deploy some of the laid off civil servants) to go through the grant applications, weed out the non-woke, strip out the "women'n'minorities" pinch of incense, and put the grants in the "suitable" pile.
Of course, then everyone would start complaining about how you can't do that, these are not The Expert Scientists but ordinary pencil-pushers making decisions, and nothing would ever change.
"The average NSF grant application typically takes 3-6 months of dedicated work"
I honestly do wonder how much time and effort it took the original grant applicants: if it was only a matter of a few hours making sure enough "women'n'minorities" sentences larded throughout, then it shouldn't take much longer to CTRL+F those. If on the other hand it did take a good chunk of the 3-6 months, then consider how many manhours (personhours?) in total were wasted on this, instead of doing the actual research work. That's what we should be getting worked up about: how much time is wasted on bullshit instead of doing Science.
The whole grant system is a massive waste of time. A significant portion (like 20% and increasing) of researcher time all over the world is spent doing grant stuff, not research. Nearly all submitted grants are fundable yet 1 in 5 or less are actually funded. It's a red queen's race and serious people have suggested replacing it with a lottery based on 1-page project descriptions.
> then everyone would start complaining about how you can't do that ... and nothing would ever change.
If the right does something stupid, the left will complain. If the right does something reasonable-but-conservative, the left will still complain. But the reasonable thing is still better than the stupid thing!
I'm not saying that the right shouldn't do anything the left complains about. But I am saying the right shouldn't do stupid things like reject a bunch of grants because they used the word 'cis-regulatory'. There's absolutely no reason why they couldn't have done the reasonable-but-conservative thing here.
But isn't political knee-bending the thing they'd be *removing* not the thing they'd be *doing*? Doesn't it matter that, there's an appropriate way to do things, namely without explicit political valence, and that's the intended format for research grant proposals?
I have to say, I am blown away by how bad you are at updating priors. Does this one observation not make you wonder if maybe you have been backing the wrong horse all this time by fighting "wokeness" (which you yourself have said you can't even define!) instead of its self-declared opposite, which is primarily embraced by fascists and idiots?
Backing the lesser evil is a good idea in winner-takes-all games (e.g. elections). In scenarios where opposing the lesser evil does not mean supporting the greater evil - you can and should opposed that lesser evil. You still have to decide how to allocate your resources, but the evil you should invest more in opposing is not necessarily the one who's more evil - rather, it should be the one who has more power.
Up until now, wokeness had more power. With Trump's second administration, anti-wokeness gets more power. So it makes more sense to focus on criticizing anti-wokeness now, but that doesn't contradict the importance of opposing wokeness during the previous administration.
Think about it - what good would it have done to oppose anti-wokeness back then, before it came into real power? That would mean less criticism on wokeness, which - assuming this criticism has any effect at all - would mean more projects would have to present themselves as more woke in order to get grants. When the pendulum swings back and camp anti-wokeness inevitably gains power, more projects would trigger their woke-detectors and get defunded.
You fight the tyrant that rules over you, not the enemy behind the gate that said tyrant uses to justify their tyranny.
He backs whichever side he thinks is right in an issue! I keep seeing comments casting this as Scott thus being on the left's side or the right's side, when the actuality of it is that he's on his own side. The post you're commenting on is about the right doing something stupid!
The left/right divide is mostly artificial (though not deliberately made), and so Scott holds a mix of views between both, but is also able to criticize both!
You sound just like the people who come onto his posts about the left/woke doing something stupid, and then saying to him "and thus you can't ever trust those damn lefties". A major problem here is insisting you can only ever be on one side.
Personally I think that Scott would be ideologically very unbiased except that he has some personal trauma baggage from a specific subset of the times people were hostile to him about something, and some very rosy ideas about people who approached him on positive terms in the past.
To the point where he sometimes ties himself in knots trying to attribute reasonable motives to someone doing a hatchet-job on American science, because they say they are fighting 'wokeness.' Trouble is, to him 'wokeness' means that nebulous crowd of angry screaming people on the Internet who traduced him 5-10 years ago. But to the people carrying the hatchets it means "anything that might require me to ever have to do what a black woman says, ever, including stuff like 'laws' and 'black people getting to have good jobs, ever' "
If you think that's what the right believes, then I think you're running into the same failure of modeling them as the right often have with understanding the left.
They do have actual motives. They are being very dumb about going at them for reasons like, well, being dumb, politically motivated to make it sound impressive, and a certain sort of vindictiveness. I don't think Scott's article remotely makes their motivations sound pure? He doesn't contort himself to attribute reasonable motivations, he's presenting their reasonable and unreasonable motivations, and then loudly saying "this is bad".
How is this a rosy view? My current stance on many of the comments in the vein of the parent is that it is mostly the tribalistic sorts who want Scott to stop fighting against their side, rather than trying to discourage the excesses and encourage the best of both, which is what he tries to do much of the time.
You are correct that this philosophy of disrupting grants on the grounds of "we saw woke keywords" is far worse for science than anything the Biden administration has done that might present an imposition on science.
What if some of those cancer researchers actually are the insufferable woke type and genuinely want to do undergraduate-outreach-to-under-represented-minorities after they're done with their cancer research? Is this really reason enough to cancel the cancer research?
Well, I don't know. It could save millions of lives. But it might also cause an underrepresented minority to learn something about science. So it's kind of a toss-up.
This seems like an uncharitable snarky response, unusual for you.
The problem is not that underrepresented minorities might incidentally learn something (which we would hope people from all walks of life might learn something) but funneling government money specifically for certain groups at the exclusion of others.
Separately, what are the chances that the cancer research grant ends up saving any lives? Probably non-zero, but it would be very unusual if we're talking thousands, let alone millions. There were over 3,400 grants. Maybe someone can sift through all of them and ask Congress to put back the best, but asking for 40-60%+ to be reinstated, or criticizing the entire project because some might be good science is an unhelpful approach.
I know he's being sarcastic, but that's not the style we normally see from Scott and I don't think it helps him convince anyone who doesn't already agree with him.
He's never been as sloppy in the past as to straight out say that this cancer research program is going to save millions of lives. If he was serious and wrote a long form post on the topic, he would likely have to round the lives saved by this specific program to zero. He normally admits such things and that's one of the major reasons that I, and many other people, continue to read his posts even when we disagree with him. Snarky one liners full of obvious nonsense and arguments as soldiers is unbecoming of him.
> If he was serious and wrote a long form post on the topic, he would likely have to round the lives saved by this specific program to zero.
The expected number of lives saved isn't millions (which is not to concede scott claimed it was; *could* is the operative word here) but given how much cancer survival rates have improved over the last few decades it strikes me as extremely implausible that it's 0.
Consider whether the point Scott is obviously making here through his sarcasm might be a good one and see if it changes your assumptions about this issue.
I already responded in the same post about that. That particular cancer research grant was never going to save millions of people. Pretending that it would, or that all of the 3400 grants combined would, is not accurate or helpful.
It's also not clear that any minorities, or anyone at all, will necessarily learn anything from one or more of these particular grants.
Nah, he gets like that sometimes, especially when the comments reach into the hundreds. He spent all his charity in the essay and so the uncharitable snark comes out.
Internet Feminists that give their blogs misogynistic names are the only group he dislikes more than conservatives, but they haven't been as active the last couple years.
Conservatives had to work long and hard to earn as much of Scott's dislike as they had. They've spent many, many billions at it and been doing it for longer than the man's been alive.
If the conservative political movement in America wanted a reasonable and justified claim on Scott Alexander's approval or even true neutrality, they should have been doing a lot of things very differently since 2015, since 2010, since 1998, and frankly since the 1960s.
Afaict Scott was agreeing with Anton (ie his sarcasm was skewering hypothetical opposition to Anton's POV), where you seem to have the impression that he was disagreeing
Well yeah, but should it target them? I'm reminded of a colleague that felt the need the "come out" as non-binary in an email list at our university. As far as I could tell she (or is it he?) was doing normal, boring, sane research. I found this a little weird and embarrassing, but ultimately not a big deal. It would be somewhat of an overreaction to just cancel her funding I'd think. Then again, I was working on something pretty useless, I'm pretty sure you can just cancel all of math research across the whole US and barely notice, but some of these people are actually doing useful cancer stuff I'd wager.
Just to check whether this is a principle you yourself hold: if someone had used the same email list to send out, say, racial slurs, would you make the same assessment that as long as they were doing "normal, boring, sane research," you should just ignore it, and keep funding them as you otherwise would have?
Here's a metaphor that might help illustrate the way I think about this: suppose you're a general in the Red Army, and you've just liberated some territory that had been under occupation by the Blue Kingdom. You find that a large number of the residents had collaborated with the Blues, but a few did not, and were killed for it. Now, if you were to going to put ALL collaborators to the sword for not choosing to resist (and die), I would say that's too harsh, and ought not to be done. But if you then ask them all for their reasons, and while most of them say they were just scared into compliance, a few say they did it because they wholeheartedly supported the Blues and wanted to see them victorious, I can't think of a good reason you SHOULDN'T put just them to the sword.
I think that over-sharing info about yourself on a mailing list is not equivalent to denigrating others on a mailing list. Though I also think that the appropriate response to someone posting slurs on a mailing list should usually be to tell them to stop, and then kick them off the mailing list if they don't, rather than trying to get them fired. (If the mailing list is somehow necessary for their job, then I suppose kicking them off the list might require firing them, and I'd still do it in that case. But I wouldn't ordinarily want them fired as an *additional* punishment.)
In your analogy, I notice that (based on your description) the previous blue occupation force was willing to let civilians who disagreed with them live as long as they complied with the occupiers' orders. So if you want to execute civilians who disagree with you regardless of whether they're willing to comply with the NEW occupying force, then you are escalating the conflict. And specifically, you are escalating by punishing people for thoughts or speech, rather than for actions. Seems bad to me.
If you're nitpicking the metaphor, you understand my point well enough. Here, you'd stop funding the people who refuse to take out the "woke" sentences in their applications after you've made it clear that's what you want, without punishing everyone who ever put them in.
I do not share your views on what counts as equivalent (and at any rate, it's not MY opinion that matters in a test of whether one holds to this espoused principle), but I agree that the moral thing to do is to to mercifully give everyone a chance to stop before enacting harsh punishments.
"I can't think of a good reason you SHOULDN'T put just them to the sword."
How about because they are your citizens, you are an enlightened civilization that has abolished the death penalty even for serial killers, and most forms of collaboration were far less serious than serial killing? To return back to the real world, those scientists are your fellow citizens, there should not be any punishment for thought crime, and even if there were, wanting to teach underrepresented minorities about science would hardly constitute a serious thought crime.
Peacetime morality. In my metaphor, you're clearly fighting a war: they're unrepentant traitors, and even if the Red Kingdom were "enlightened" in the way you posit, I'd say most states would consider them worse.
I think you lost the real-life context along the way. The ones who'd be punished are those who refuse to take the ACTION of taking out the "woke" sentences.
> How about because they are your citizens, you are an enlightened civilization that has abolished the death penalty even for serial killers,
How did I miss this last night
I really dont find that enlightened; currently men in 23 hour solitary confinement, who we have plently of evidence of murder, sit at the top of americas criminal hierarchy. There is no reason not to kill them, any message they get out will likely be a command to kill someone for being slightly merciful and snitches who have been bribed into compliance escaping criminal organizations may die, random.
If a man kills another inside a prison with full cameras and no doubt, death; theres no reason to let darker cultural evolution of racial gang politics to play out.
Considering a few of the people in the list are not white I'd consider the second hypothetical requires both a stern talking by the advisor and probably some apology is in order. If she had said something like "I'm glad Trump is in power, now we get to deport all illegals" or something like that, some stern talking to is in order too, but no apology. Does that make it clearer?
If xe comes out in an email to xyr colleagues but otherwise just does "normal, boring, sane research" then it's no reason.
If xe decides xyr research needs to be all about non-binary folx and the lack of representation for xem in academia instead of the topic xe originally chose, then it's affecting the funding.
Personally, I think the likes of the "capacitors instead of batteries for the Internet of Things" grant applications should be served by private industry research instead; if it's commercially feasible or interesting, businesses will be interested in that. If it's just make-work, as I suspect, that's why they can't attract outside interest and need to apply for government funding.
Pure maths research is the kind of thing that can and should be funded by government as it's unlikely that private sector will be interested. But if someone wants to go on about the lack of non-binary queer Third World mathematicians, that's the social sciences department and not maths.
Obviously if she says her research needs to be *all* about non-binary folks, that would be misuse of resources, but if she wants to add inclusive welcoming language to some reading seminar she's doing anyway that'd be annoying but ok. Her advisor was a professor that did things like complain about discrimination against women in academia during logistic meetings. Despite this, she was a very good female researcher, and I don't think she should be sacked either for that. It'd be a shame to lose her quite frankly astounding capacity for mathematics. If it makes you feel better I don't think any of her colleagues (all men) took her any seriously.
The problem is coming to an agreement on how much the research can or should be about [woke shibboleth] and how much needs to be about neutral good research.
Obviously the Biden administration was communicating that even good neutral research would benefit from throwing some wokeness in. That's bad. Like, really really bad. A lot of people, including myself, are okay with a bit of personality and personal goals of the researchers as long as it doesn't take away from the research. Your example of welcoming language is probably in that category (as long as "welcoming" doesn't turn into "and all you other groups are lesser/scum/unimportant" or whatever.
But how much is okay? Ted Cruz apparently thinks almost none is okay, and he's got a lot of support for that. Some people apparently think that wokeness needs to be added to everything, to fix past wrongs proactively. This is not an easy thing to figure out. Right now we seem to be on "if you control the presidency you decide" and I think that's bad, but what other options are there on the table?
Maybe your colleague was tired of being misgendered by colleagues and thought an email would be an efficient way to reduce their own labor around that, while showing blanket support for other colleagues who might be in a similar situation? I'm speculating, I don't know the details of what the email said, but that seems like a reasonable guess based on other folks I know who've been in a similar position.
Coming out is generally a process that can be awkward at best and dangerous at worst, and there isn't any kind of training that queer folks are guaranteed to get on how to make sure it lands right.
Then let them go do outreach instead of pretending to do cancer research. I'm very darn sceptical there, because the insufferable wokie types tend to prefer to hang around their college peers rather than mingle with the horny-handed sons of toil (remember the DSA discussing it's 'nobody here is real proletariat' problem?)
If they've bunged up the grant application sufficiently that one cannot tell if it's about cancer research or a nice little cosy niche lecturing about the lack of Blackness in cancer research, then I think that's a failure all of its own.
I mean, for a while there the DSA's poster girl was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who as I recall was working as a bartender and waitress; her mother cleaned houses. If that's not proletarian, I don't know what is.
More broadly, I think the great divide is not so much between "wokie types" and "horny-handed sons of toil."
It is between "people with center-left political views" and "people whose entire news media consumption is specifically calibrated to indoctrinate them to the belief that anyone to the left of Margaret Thatcher is some kind of demonic infiltrator out to destroy all that is good and pure." Regardless of their class background, people in the former and latter categories will not get along well.
However, within the latter group's narrative, being the "real, red-blooded sons of toil" is a point of pride (to the point where a man like Donald Trump can be seen by some as more authentically working-class-like than the aforesaid bartender daughter of a house-cleaner). I have come to believe that "leftists are elitist" is one of those symptoms of the old problem "ten thousand repetitions make one truth."
That is not to say there are no elitist leftists- but it is not a problem specifically, uniquely, or even <i>impressively</i> endemic to the left.
Ah, yes: the bartender and waitress who got a job while in college working as an intern for Ted Kennedy, launched her own small press, worked for a non-profit, and was selected as one of the panel of candidates by a Democratic party kingmaker. I see some "she came from a poor working-class family" stuff online, but her father was a "small business owner and architect" and not a ditch-digger.
"After graduating college, OCASIO-CORTEZ returned to the Bronx and worked in various jobs, including: Educational Director for the National Hispanic Institute; founder of Brook Avenue Press, a now defunct publishing press created to share positive stories about the Bronx; a community organizer for Bernie Sander’s 2016 campaign for U.S. President; and a waitress and bartender."
It was a nice biography, and I'm not disputing that after her father died the household took a tumble financially, but it was rather burnished for the "I'm an ordinary working gal from the Bronx" credentials, as all politicians who want to appeal to the electorate on grounds of "I'm just a plain Joe like all of you and I'm not ashamed of my humble beginnings" burnish their beginnings.
Hot take: researchers should not have to "bend the knee" every time a new administration gets into power.
In fact, the fact that the new administration is demanding that the entire civil apparatus "bend the knee" or else be fired is a major red flag, and it's ridiculous for you to be so blasé about it. Biden didn't fire every Trump-appointed judge when he took office. This shit shouldn't be normalized.
Biden, or his administration, did require that the DEI pinch of incense be present in every grant application or else it would automatically go on the reject pile. Isn't that demanding "bending the knee"?
What evidence do you have for this claim? The cultural norms begun during Reagan slowly made it seem increasingly mandatory to at least nod at broader impact. Did anything change during Biden's tenure about this system?
I wrote one of these in 2014 and already had to put this in. (Mine was basically to put time into helping out a local high school rocket club, which I did do in my spare time and would have done whether or not I won the grant). So this stuff predates Biden — Blame Obama if you want but it probably predates him too — and stuck around through Trump’s 1st term.
First, can we localize the evidence that the "DEI pinch of incense" was required? The fact that it was present in a list of grant proposals specifically identified by Ted Cruz as being "woke" is not strong evidence of it being a requirement.
Second, there is a fundamental difference between
1) "In your extensive grant proposal that has to meet literally dozens if not hundreds of specific requirements, you have to gesture in the direction of slipping a coin to women, racial minorities, or the handicapped" and
2) "If you ever thus gestured, your grant should be canceled, or if you work for the federal government and did anything ensuring regulatory compliance with laws mandating nondiscrimination towards those groups, or if you ever planned a cultural festival for a minority culture, et cetera, et cetera, you are fired/defunded/your agency is going to be dismantled and its files confiscated by a bunch of 23-year-old ascended script kiddies with names like BigBalls420."
(1) may be bad policy, perhaps, but operates broadly within the framework of a civil service system that adheres to the rule of law. (2) does not operate within the framework of the rule of law and is very much incompatible with the idea of even <i>trying, ever again</i> to have a policy-neutral civil service system.
Why do you consider it so outrageous that for an elected government to want a civil service bureaucracy not actively hostile to the agenda it wishes to enact? Is it not one of the much-vaunted benefits of democracy that people get to change their rulers if they wished it?
The American democracy doesn't mean "someone who gets 50% of the vote one time gets to do literally whatever they want". There is rule of law, procedural protections, etc. for very good reason. Republicans are very happy that we don't live in a dictatorship whenever Democrats are in power.
It's also important to point out that this isn't a matter of blue vs red. Trump is trying to purge the government of everyone who will say no to him *regardless of ideology* in a very unprecedented way. A lot of his targets are actually career Republicans! One of the prosecutors he just fired was a Federalist Society member who clerked for a conservative SC justice!
Trump isn't just purging Democrats, he's also purging Republicans who have a conscience and that is an EXTREMELY dangerous precedent.
This assumes Trump's premise that the civil service bureaucracy 2017-2021 *was* actively hostile to his agenda. Invalid premise. For the most part, people wanted to do their jobs and balked at being asked to break the law.
This contains within it the proposition that President Trump's agenda during his first term, and apparently in his own opinion during his second term, involves telling a lot of people to break the law a lot.
The implications of this proposition are interesting, to those of us who have fond memories of high school civics lessons about the rule of law, checks and balances, the role of institutional stability in a developed society, and the appropriate relationship between the citizenry of a republic and any aspiring tyrants who may arise.
Except I suspect there's a motte and bailey going on here. Musk and Trump don't really seem to believe the government should be funding science research, any more than education research or humanitarian aid. Or rather, they have no principled commitment to funding these things (I'm sure Musk will be happy to continue to funnel money to Tesla and SpaceX through his connection with Trump in classic oligarch fashion). But most people don't agree with this, so they retreat to the claim of "we are just making everything more efficient by eliminating wokeness." The easiest way to accomplish the one while pretending the other is to dismantle all of these systems and lay off all the administrators without ever building anything to replace them, and then perpetually claim that some newer, better system is around the corner until either everyone forgets or they're out of office.
Given Musk's opposition to the F-35, I'm not sure Musk actually does support scientific advancements that benefit the military, in reality.
To be more precise, I am sure that Musk and Trump <i>think it desirable to have impressive, powerful, effective weapons at their disposal</i>. If you gave Trump or Musk a button he could push to make the US military be armed with unstoppable death rays and guarded by invincible force fields, he would surely push the button, at least once he'd gotten someone to trace the wiring and make sure he got paid a nice big cut of the cash costs for it.
However, given a choice between "continuing science research that benefits the military" and "ensuring their own gratification and sense of control over science, the military, and society in general," I predict that men like this will choose gratification and sense of control every time.
This is a familiar pattern we've seen with both Musk and Trump in civilian life- that they will disrupt or even break an organization under their control, rather than acknowledge that they do not have full personal power to reshape it in accordance with their whims.
This is why Pete Hegseth is now Secretary of Defense. He wasn't chosen because he's a conservative who's expected to do a good job making the military <i>materially powerful and efficient</i>. He was chosen because he's a conservative who's trusted to do exactly what Donald Trump says, and to make the military <i>aesthetically</i> 'impressive' in a manner Donald Trump understands as being desirable.
If your military is firing trans people from its cyber-security and drone-piloting and logistics branches because they're "not proper warriors" or what have you, then quite frankly, your commander in chief is not optimizing for military success. He's optimizing for a sense of control over the process.
I worry that some form of LLM prompting was what got them into this situation, so I don't trust their AI skills and am happy to let them spend the week of work.
It might be bad science, but I'd be interested to see the results if you (or Rob Miles here) spent 30 minutes getting Claude to go through the same 100 papers as you did.
I first had to convince Claude 3.5 Sonnet that it was reasonable to consider that it was ok to think about whether a proposal was woke or not. It then classified all but the last two as not woke, the second to last one as "elements focused on diversity and inclusion" but didn't want to call it woke, and the the last one as woke (but still didn't want to deny the proposal). Reasonable-ish.
ChatGPT 4o gave "Heavily Woke (DEI is a Major or Core Focus)" to the last 2, "Moderately Woke (Significant but Secondary DEI Component)" to BRAIN, and "Not Woke (Primarily Technical)" to the rest. I'm a little concerned about classifying BRAIN as Moderately Woke.
Honestly, to revoke $2B in funding it's worth just paying for human review. But if you just assign a young enough employee to classify them, it might end up being done by an LLM anyway.
So, here's an idea, get *two* people to review the grants. Or more. If you want to be actually *careful* rather than simply fast and cheap, though, you'd get more than one knowledgable person to review the same grant. Which, hey , is actually how science funding works.
Many Thanks! We can't, of course, simply duplicate the original review process, since that let the 10%-20% of the grants in the database that are _clearly_ Woke activism masquerading as science through. Adding multiple reviewers with _a specific mandate to find and remove Woke grants_ is indeed reasonable.
Thank you, Brinkwater, for actually trying this out, for working through the prompting necessary to convince it to do this and give it adequate direction, and for sharing your experiences with Sonnet's takes on the grant examples which Scott shared!
Did you try a non-adversarial prompt? For example, you could tell Claude you need help rating applications on a five-point scale, where five is clearly focused on progressive goals: assisting or understanding underprivileged groups, interrogating power-relations that depend on demographic characteristics, challenging normative sexualities, exclusionary linguistic practices, etc.. [Extend the rubric and gradients as needed.]
Trump cancelling Biden's AI-regulation bill also seems reflexively stupid, but it doesn't look like they were bringing LLMs to bear on USAID and the like.
In the year 2025+, we can expect to see a strong overlap between AI mistakes and mistakes made by human beings who are either too mentally bankrupt or too indifferent to care about product quality, because one of the first things that type of human being will do when faced with a task is ask themselves "how can I get a robot to do it for me," and they will then get a robot to do it... badly."
I suspect it might be worse than that. The 0 effort thing to do is to just type "diversity minorities" or something into a search box, and blindly copy the entire list. Did they even use something as smart as a modern LLM? Or was it just grep?
Also, sadly, if you look in the last page of that report, some of the phrases they were looking for ("climate research", "green new deal", "net zero", "climate change", "green energy") are unrelated to DEI.
Ah, but Ted Cruz absolutely would call "green energy" a woke idea, which is weird because he supposedly and theoretically represents the state of Texas, which gets something close to 30% of its electricity from wind and solar energy these days.
An LLM like Claude would do a much better job of classifying all 3400 grant proposals as woke or not woke and the cost would probably be under $100. Not perfect but almost certainly better than the keyword bingo they are using now
If someone from the Trump admin messages me and says they'll accept it, I will just read through the grants for free and sort them into a list of woke and non-woke
From their point of view, that's pretty much what they did- they just don't know or care about the difference between "you" and "whoever they actually gave that job to." Nor do they know or care about the quality of output. The point of "anti-wokeness" in the Trump administration is not to carefully excise some kind of systemic bad idea from an otherwise respected scientific or political structure. It is to provide a justification for smashing up the entirety of the structure and reorienting it so that it (still) more efficiently funnels money to oligarchs.
If the Trump administration cared about fine distinctions in these things, they wouldn't be 'accidentally' firing air traffic controllers and nuclear weapon safety inspectors and then scrambling to rehire them when they realize the mistake.
> people inserted a meaningless sentence saying “this could help women and minorities” into unrelated grants, probably in the hopes of getting points with some automated filter.
Now anyone doing that will get their research funding denied. They (or someone else) can apply again after removing the cancer cells.
> JUST FUND RESEARCH TO CURE CANCER WITHOUT JUDGING IT ON WHETHER THERE IS A SENTENCE ABOUT MINORITY OUTREACH IN THE GRANT PROPOSAL!
JUST DO RESEARCH TO CURE CANCER WITHOUT BRINGING WOKENESS INTO EVERYTHING!
I'm personally happy if 20% of non-woke programmes get cancelled along with 60% (edited - 80 to 60) woke or woke-affiliated programmes.
The 20% will be more than made up in the next round with 100% of programmes that are free to focus on curing cancer, rather than 'Co-creation of affinity groups to facilitate diverse & inclusive ornithological societies'.
The 20% of non-woke programs include things like curing cancer, and the 80% of woke programs could have been found anyway if a single human had read this list before Cruz put it out.
Imagine you are a cancer researcher. Your boss says your grant will only get approved if you include the sentence "Curing cancer will help women and minorities". You think this is stupid, so you do this. The next month, you hear Ted Cruz has cancelled all of your funding. You may or may not be able to get more funding if you spend three months writing a new grant and then wait another three months for it to be considered, but by that time all of your employees will have left because you're not paying them, all of your samples will have died because you can't afford the electricity to support them, etc.
I think you should just admit they should have read the list before releasing it.
Yes! I absolutely agree this was idiotic! I hope I expressed this in the post, in sentences like "It reflects poorly on the Biden administration that you could only get a grant to cure cancer if you suggested you might teach an underrepresented minority child about it."
I think releasing a list without reading it is only a minor sin, because it's just a list, but the USAID experience is that they actually act on these lists without double-checking them first, and I thought I should blog about it fast in case there was some way to impact whether they did that or not.
I do think however that a one-time cancellation of funding, with the opportunity for a do-over next time in an increased pool of funding, in a way that sends a loud message that wokeness isn't tolerated...
is better than an ongoing, systemic drive to (a) fund wasteful research, (b) distort useful research with time and money required to spend on wasteful activities, each year forever.
I haven't attempted to quantify it but my gut feel is that the negative impact of the latter greatly outweighs the former.
Does that intuition match yours? Where does it differ?
On another level... you may be saying 'the overall idea is good but seriously guys, read the list first, remove the non-woke programmes, do better'.
I agree with that, but still think their actions hold positive value, and prefer an administration that moves fast and roughly in the right direction over one that moves precisely nowhere.
Of course a perfect administration would be the best of all.
> I do think however that a one-time cancellation of funding, with the opportunity for a do-over next time in an increased pool of funding, in a way that sends a loud message that wokeness isn't tolerated... is better than an ongoing, systemic drive to (a) fund wasteful research, (b) distort useful research with time and money required to spend on wasteful activities, each year forever.
In four or eight or (at most) twelve years there'll be a Democrat back in the White House, and all this hard work will be undone anyway.
According to Ted Cruz' press release, the list is 10% of the grants approved by the Biden admin.
And you found that 40% of those 10% are just throwing in buzzwords, or 4% of all grants.
So that means 90% of the grants Biden approved had neither "woke" buzzwords nor were "woke science". So it seems pretty easy to get a grant approved without throwing in something DEI-related
I feel like you're being rather misleading by leaving the actual numbers out of your conclusion
We don't know if the sample Scott selected was *representative*, but it was at least pseudo-randomly selected.
And as such, it's not entirely unreasonable to surmise that the remaining 3300+ grants might have a similar 40/20/40 split.
Even if that's not the case, we don't have sufficient evidence here to assume that 90% of the approved grants on the Sen. Cruz-announced "woke" list "had neither "woke" buzzwords nor were "woke science.""
"It reflects poorly on the Biden administration that you could only get a grant to cure cancer if you suggested you might teach an underrepresented minority child about it." But was that true? You've read all the cancer grants?
I wonder at the lack of historical perspective. Medical science had a long history of taking white men as the 'standard' for, say, clinical trials. This has changed drastically over past 50 years. So, what about grants whose biomedical research recognizes the importance of including subjects who are minorities, women, any group not approved by the new regime? Are they going to be called 'woke'?
I agree that a grant proposal to study ovarian cancer is targeted towards women and not men (whatever the colour of their skin).
However, that was likely to get me in trouble for ignoring non-binary folx and trans men who are somehow in some liminal state in which they are at one and the same time real men and not at all female, and yet possess female biology. But don't call them women, especially not biological women, because that's offensive.
What I'm hearing here is that English is simply not rich enough to describe the categories people want. A modest proposal: the Japanese porn industry can provide us with well established terms for making all the fine distinctions succinctly.
Futanari: woman with a penis.
Otokonoko: cis man who prefers to wear dresses + wigs.
That's roughly in line with what Musk said about transparency and accountability at DOGE: he tweets about everything they did, and people can point out mistakes.
So, the intended MO for the administration is to do hasty, ill-advised BS and maybe, just maybe, walk it back if enough people raise a stink on social media? You Americans are in for a couple of nerve-wracking years, and the rest of the world as well.
It's a weird time, that's for sure. But a few weeks ago people were saying that Musk would fail like every other attempt in the last 50 years to cut back on government spending.
Trying something novel and a bit weird seems like the only option to people who actually want to see government waste exposed and cut.
“A couple of weeks ago people were saying Musk wouldn’t be able to fix up the chipped facade on the Taj Mahal, but now he’s taking a sledgehammer to it! Trying something novel and a bit weird seems necessary when you don’t know how else to do it, let’s see how it works out!
>"It reflects poorly on the Biden administration that you could only get a grant to cure cancer if you suggested you might teach an underrepresented minority child about it."
But isn't this list of 'woke grants' from the administration, already less than 10% of the total grants awarded during the relevant period?
Like, if these are the only grants that have these types of boilerplate sentences in them, then 90% of the grants awarded do not have them.
t seems very wrong to say 'you can't get a grant without these boilerplate sentences' if 90% of the grants awarded didn't have them.
I guess I see this as a shot in the war against wokeness which has some collateral damage, but has a positive return (when considering billions of wasted dollars not studying cancer, into perpetuity - talking about the explicitly woke programmes).
I hope this keeps happening. Now there's more money available to fund cancer research into perpetuity.
The moderates who the left thinks are the right still trust the science; and in fact, boomers neocons probable are still 70/30 on college
If the main bulk of the right had actually moved on from sending children to college at new higher rates year after year; we see a very different world
PEPFAR was created under Bush and approved by Republicans in congress as recently as December 2024. The National Endowment for Democracy was created under Regan and has a lot of Republicans on its board, including a *sitting Republican senator*. And so on.
The amount of monstrous stuff people will do to bystanders and just shrug off as "collateral damage" is amazing. All the while claiming that this is being done to free those bystanders from the previous set of half-assed ruled.
For a lot of people the only objection to a boot stomping on a human face is that the boot isn't on their foot.
It seems like this is just the same failure mode as what you're complaining about - if we should just fund science on its merits rather than whether it phrases itself in a way that aligns with the administration's culture-war positions, it's equally bad to raise or lower the odds for somebody including or excluding a couple random culture-war sentences.
This assumes they didn't really mean the "random culture-war sentences," and only included them because they were forced to. This is probably true of most of them, but how does one distinguish them from those who meant them, and WERE planning to spend a significant portion of their funding on such activities?
And leaving aside the question of past grant applications, it definitely applies going forward. Not woke people who didn't want to stick their head above the turret probably cowardly added these sentences to their applications. They shouldn't have, but they did.
But now they have no reason to. If they still do, that's really on them.
Well, I imagine that would come up in their grant applications somewhere.
But also how much is that really a justified concern? How much research do we need to scour just to make sure nobody tries to do something too progressive?
Simple. Do what Scott did. Read the damn thing! Does it look like run-of-the-mill basic research with a shibboleth tacked on to pass a stupid requirement, or does it look substantially woke? The method may not be 100% accurate, but it's a lot better than not even reading it!
I think a crude measure of distinguishing "who really meant them" are the proposals about studying Blackness or queerness or "feminist glaciers". Those can probably be dumped on the "are you kidding me" pile.
Things like "working on brain injuries or cancer research, oh yeah and mustn't forget women'n'minorities" can probably go on the "okay fine" pile.
Well.... not at all. If people write in their grant application that they want to build tunnels more efficiently to teach Hamas how to kill more Jews, that is a bad thing - I don't want to fund that grant. If they say they want to make them cheaper that is not "the opposite culture war position".
Racial discrimination is illegal. If people talk in their grant application about how they want to implicitly use it for some racially discriminative end, that's bad. Penalising those who do, and not penalising those who don't, *is* funding on the merits. The thing you shouldn't do - which I'm not aware of anyone serious advocating for - is favouring applications which promise to discriminate against minorities.
Uh... okay? My point is that "get rid of grant applications with some woke language in them" seems like the same failure mode as "only fund grant applications with woke language in them", not that I think anybody is literally in favor of pro-racism grant proposals.
I’m sort of vaguely amused by your implicit assertion that those dollars will now go towards curing cancer, because I have seen to sense of an agenda of how to accomplish that, rather than some different buzzword system for earning grant money or simply returning it to the wealthy who would only donate a small portion of that amount to cancer-curing institutions.
I don't understand why they couldn't have taken the 34 hours, cancelled the actually woke ones, and sent the nonwoke ones a letter saying "In the future, you don't need to include a sentence about outreach to minorities".
I don't think the best way to stop wasting billions of dollars, or fund cancer research, is to in fact ruin billions of dollars worth of good science including cancer research for no reason (or, charitably, because you don't like one meaningless sentence in their proposal).
I feel like this is the same discussion we had from the other direction ten years ago. People were saying "Well I don't care if some good researcher is collateral damage in the war on racism! And besides, he included one racist-sounding sentence in his proposal, so he deserves it!" I think we will constantly be going back and forth on this horrible pendulum until people stop gleefully celebrating all of the "collateral damage" that their ideology causes.
Nobody would include that sentence if it hadn't previously been required! They can just let everyone know they're removing the requirement! They don't have to also burn a billion dollars and a thousand science careers!
So, uh...you're not going to make an argument that the increased message effectiveness is WORTH the collateral damage? You're taking it for granted that message effectiveness is so much more important than collateral damage that there's no serious chance that avoiding collateral damage could ever be the better side of the trade-off?
Why would you want to convey that message? Why should you care if someone includes a sentence saying that a black person might read something if you fund this grant? Are you so focused on the political implications that you’d rather restrict science to fit your politics?
Can we agree on "don't include this sentence unless you really are doing research on a problem that mainly or solely affects black women/Native Americans/one-legged penguins"?
I"m pretty sure there's a vengeful element here influencing most people who are in favor of just sticking with this dumb system of sorting grants. "Good! Fuck those people who stuck in token woke sentences and so in a tiny way contributed to the maintenance of the woke era., They were complicit."
Betcha every one of you has gone along with some nonsense requirement without complaint at school or at work. Once you start tuning out info like that about yourself in order to more wholeheartedly despise something understandable another person did, you are no longer thinking about fairness and justice, you're just diddling your indignation center.
Yes, I think you are right about at least some of the motivation.
Weirdly, in 2020 I wrote in Maximilien Robespierre as my protest write-in candidate. And the _other_ plausible motive for such a crude system is to recreate something like the Terror... ( fortunately, no guillotines this time... )
"I think we will constantly be going back and forth on this horrible pendulum until people stop gleefully celebrating all of the "collateral damage" that their ideology causes."
I have to agree unhappily here. Never thought I'd be nostalgic for the 90s but I'd go back to the days of Captain Planet and neon coloured clothing just to avoid the excesses of "you said X/well you said Y first" today.
Others have touched on this, but why in the world would it take 3 months to delete a single line from an application document and resubmit it?
Also, why would you assume they'll cancel all the grants? This seems a very long bow, given that a substantial share of them seem to have completed (there is a field "Performance End Date" and almost half are already passed) - seems hard to cancel a grant for an already finished project/expenditure. Perhaps I missed it, but the link doesn't say "we'll cancel all these". Instead it explicitly says "Chairman Cruz has requested significant scrutiny of awards listed in the database." Which is indicative of the contrary.
To the extent that some not-yet-conducted grants are cancelled, and people have to reapply, the funding won't have been used, so it's hardly a complete waste either.
Aren’t most of these grants that have started being funded but not completed? “pausing” it for six months now is effectively throwing away the money you’ve already spent, and making them waste time while you approve them to start over and hire new people now that the old ones all left to get a new job because their funding was “paused”.
There are two date fields in the document. The "end date" has passed in close to half of them, and growing by the day. I am not entirely sure what the end date means in practice - the legit end date on the project, the date by which the money will have been spent, etc. In general I would imagine that the money is full spent prior to the end date most of the time. (It is also possible that the "end date" is some meaningless date that people stick on a form at the start, and has no effect once the money is granted, in which case we'd be guessing even more).
Depending on what the study involves, it's also totally not true that "“pausing” it for six months now is effectively throwing away the money you’ve already spent". If the funding was to buy lab equipment, well, that's already paid for. It'll still be there 6 months later. (And of course you can continue - the grant is paused, no-one says you can't keep doing research). If you've bought a dataset, it's still bought. Often these grants are in effect a slush fund - the dirty secret of these things is that there is, fwiu and consistent with my anecdotal experience, essentially zero enforcement mechanism that you spend the money on what you say you'll spend it on, and often it ends up being a generic slush fund to pay for RAs and/or buy out teaching time. (You probably at some point do the research you talked about in your grant, but no-one verifies that the $s from grant X are spent on project X and often they are not).
And then there's stuff like the wonderful, deep and insightful "feminist glaciology" paper, (funded by you, Mr and Mrs Taxpayer, NSF Grant #1253779) where among many appropriate questions one surely is "why did this require grant money in the first place?"
In most cases, most of the money is spent on hiring people (mainly grad students and post docs). “Pausing” that spending means firing those people until funds are available again, then maybe trying to hire them back if they haven’t moved on to something else in the meantime so that you need to put out a new ad and go through a new process.
This is an extremely field-specific claim/assumption. (I would rather hope that grants for projects in physics labs are disproportionately unlikely to be infiltrated with woke nonsense). Plus, as people like to say, money is fungible, people often have access to multiple pots and can switch between things.
You can keep on whinging (and complaining about pushback against ideological corruption of science that you seemingly had no problem with, all you can complain about is the pushback) but for all the hyperbole this is likely going to only affect a sliver of a sliver of grants.
> Also, why would you assume they'll cancel all the grants?
Because they've already canceled most scientific research and keep talking about how much they want to do so? Also, just look at what happened to USAID.
It's not a secret that Musk is taking a "kill them all and let god sort it out" approach to government. He's openly bragging about it!
It’s even worse than this. The time to funding is more like 6-12 months and the chance of getting funded is ~10%. Losing a grant on a project is an effective way to kill it completely.
BTW, I am a professor with NSF funding and my grant is on this list. My grant is to study how polymers (specifically polyethylene) crystallize.
If I offered a bet that a year from now, grant proposals will only be considered if they contain a token sentence on how the research will strengthen America's position in the world, would you bet against it?
And perhaps more importantly, they should make sure to use a euphemism if they want to suggest they might be talking about individuals who aren’t straight white men.
Hey, maybe you could just assume that the grant-writers aren't going to discriminate instead of requiring them to put in writing HERE, EXACTLY, ARE THE WAYS IN WHICH WE WILL FURTHER RACISM AND SEXISM.
The thing I think you are missing is that these grants are primary funding for many institutions and programs, beyond the research that they fund. Thus institutional goals must creep into the grant-giving process because that process controls institutional funding.
This is itself a terrible state of affairs, it would be great if there were grants for research only and grants for institutional goals and those were separate pipelines. But to get that you'd need to reform everything about the process at a much more fundamental level. Trying to pretend the system works that way when it doesn't is just going to produce bad policy.
How much would you bet that overall funding for actually productive research will increase under the Trump administration? I have extremely low expectations and frankly struggle to imagine the mind of someone who believes that this administration will be beneficial for science. If I'm really honest, I'm not even sure how someone can simultaneously hold generally favorable views of both science (i.e. the empirical study of the natural world, not necessarily actually existing scientific institutions) and Republicans.
Ok but let’s look at this from the perspective of someone who’s not really invested in the culture war and wokeness and would just like to get some really high quality research to understand the world and save lives.
Under the “woke Biden world”, some researchers throw in a line about helping minorities and a tiny percentage of researchers get money for some woke research we don’t understand the point of.
Under the “anti-woke Cruz world”, we threaten really good basic research potentially improving/saving millions of lives.
Like it really seems the second world is much more worrying and is more “cancer”. (Like literally could cause more actual cancer)
Not sure why this is worse than the Biden admin passing over grant applications that don’t have woke sentences in them. Especially since we know that this practice affected a lot more than grant applications including jobs, university placements e.g. diversity statements.
This seems like a bit of laziness that could be fixed by someone influential informing Cruz about the mistake unlike the previous status-quo which enforced the expression of left wing views if you wanted a job in academia.
He stated pretty clearly that it was bad and dumb that the Biden administration was forcing these inclusions. That doesn't make this better. That just means that they had an incredibly low bar for being better than the previous admin and they _still failed to do so_.
Good thing you are entirely making up that second part. We absolutely could and should be doing things about it. But "It's dumb and bad so you should do literally anything, including other dumb and bad things", is not a great response. Why not do good solutions instead?
Other people have pointed out that these sentences and genuflections are part of the broader impacts requirements of grant funding (and, as such, have mostly existed since long before Biden). Get rid of broader impacts requirements (which are generally just fancy wording for trying to inject this bullshit into science), and these kinds of stupid sentences go away, and you _don't_ have to throw out large amounts of real and useful science.
It took me literally 30 seconds to come up with a better idea than this whole stupid virtue/vice signalling theater. And it's not even that good of an idea! I'm sure there are many, many better ones! The fact that Cruz' office was not able to come up with any of them is a staggeringly horrible indictment.
You clearly like where his hear is at, so you should be even more annoyed than I am. Demand better. Don't be satisfied with this swill.
They're talking about "broader impacts" sections, which have been required for NSF applications (and resented by researchers) for decades. That can mean anything from "national security" to "increased economic competitiveness" to "increased well-being" to, yes, "participation of underrepresented minorities in STEM".
Thanks. And that's pretty much what I expected: I didn't pay *too* much attention to the news out of the States during the Biden era, but I expect the explosion of conservative outrage if Biden has done what people are insinuating would have been pretty hard to miss.
Exactly. And NSF is a small fish in every way compared to NIH, and the DoE, and the DoD, the other big funders of science in the USA, which I'm sure most of the chuds applauding these moves are clueless about. The idea that all required all grants to have a 'woke' rider is nonsense.
I think this is what's bothering me about this whole debate. "National security" can refer (in for example DoD) grants either to actions that support Ukraine (and thus strengthen NATO) or actions that support Israel (an ally, but also possibly lead to deaths in Gaza). We can disagree about which side we support in either of these cases, but the laudable goal of improving national security doesn't itself bother us. "Increased economic competitiveness" *can* mean in polluting industries or in sustainable industries, but the phrase itself is laudable, no problem with it. "increased well-being" of ... whom exactly? Don't worry about it, no problem. These are all seen, somehow, as apolitical. But suddenly research that promises to specifically benefit underrepresented minorities is A) outside the legitimate scientific scope and B) woke and therefore bullshit, and C) automatically divisive.
I don't think "apolitical" is quite the right framing. The new right does not seem willing to acknowledge a distinct public sphere at all - it's just war for them, top to bottom. (No doubt someone will be along eventually to argue that the shitlibs did it first, thereby illustrating my point.)
Some statement to the effect of the general value of your research beyond the narrow topic it is focused on is indeed required. But this requirement is ancient and has absolutely nothing to do with Biden. I can't say I know when these statements began, but they have been common my entire scientific career, since the GWB administration
I don't want to defend any evaluators who gave preferential treatment to research projects just for making woke noises, but I do think that canceling research that is already in progress is worse than refusing to fund it in the first place. Canceling is more wasteful than avoiding, and a hypothetical equilibrium where both parties cancel each others' ongoing research whenever power changes hands is much worse than a hypothetical equilibrium where both parties merely change where NEW funding goes while in power.
The total FY 2024 funding was $11.314 billion. All these put together was $2.05 billion. I have no idea if this is including future outlays to the point that it would be better to compare it to 2024+2025 FY, or whatever, but presumably it is reasonable to use FY 2024 as a lower bound on the total funding these grants are part of. So, at a reasonable assumption only ~7% (40% of ~18%) felt the need to add dumb stuff, which is a plausible-enough number even if the Biden administration was actually wokeness-neutral and this was just rumors/superstition. If it was actually a controlling factor then I would expect ~every single grant to look like this.
This has been in place since the 1980s. It's not Biden related. Silly? Maybe. But it's pretty clear here that this is taking a flamethrower to a dandelion.
Aside from the sheer incompetence described above: it's worse because it's a sucker-punch.
Yes, it's stupid to reject an application because it doesn't have a boilerplate statement about being woke. Just as it's stupid to reject it because it DOES have such a statement. But that's not what they're doing. They're applying a new rule that didn't exist last week, and they're doing it retroactively.
The left-wing equivalent would be if Biden, on entering office, had cancelled any existing projects that didn't have a sentence about supporting minorities in the original brief.
I worry you might be being much too generous with the assumption that the administration or their supporters have made mistakes here. Painting stuff with a broad brush suits political goals like:
1. Justifying themselves to the public
2. Justifying themselves to the hardcore online base
3. Enjoyably persecuting an enemy group (basically all scientists vote for Democrats).
4. Serving the interests of that section of their coalition which essentially wants no public money for science.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the reason Ted Cruz put out this sloppy list is so it will get cited a hundred times along with the words "over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion in federal funding" on the comfortable assumption that very few people will read any of these. Just like the list of woke USAID projects.
I think the cynical view here may be more accurate. But I still think it's good to write things of the form "Alice claimed to be doing X, but she actually did Y, and it should not be hard to actually do X", even if you think Alice did Y on purpose.
For the woke example of the grants to encourage Native Americans to go into STEM fields - the grant even says the institutions are tribal colleges. Which are colleges run by Native American tribes. Who attends tribal colleges? 99% or more are tribal members. In other words… wait for it… Native Americans. What were they supposed to do, not say? Yikes.
This is a useful list though. That one sentence people thought would help, having the opposite effect.
Would it? I could have sworn I'd heard people--quite a number of people, especially here--insist that "wokeness" was a recent phenomenon and that any claims to tie it to previous social movements were fake and disingenuous.
Seriously? Tribal colleges are the main educational opportunities available for Native Americans on tribal land. If they didn't exist many students would have no higher education within a practical commuting distance. You'd rather they never were formed and Native Americans not go to college?
Also, even if you don't like it, tribal governments also are legally independent and have the right to do the same things that states can do. Should we get rid of all state universities like UCLA?
Maybe you are making the unwarranted assumption that only Native Americans can enroll? That is incorrect, they are typically open to all, but since they are on tribal land they typically serve primarily Native Americans.
There shouldn't be "tribal lands" or "tribes" for that matter. The idea of special privileges or chunks of land belonging to members of certain groups by virtue of their ancestors having been a special race is straight-up racism, it should have been chucked out along with slavery and DEI.
I'm not sure I understand your preferred environment. Back in the 19th century, the US government entered into agreements with established tribes to recognize the authority and limited sovereignty of those tribes in some defined geographical areas. Should the government have refused to make those agreements?
If so, should the government have tried to compel all Indians to live in towns, and continued war against tribes who refused? Should the government have made those agreements, and then cancelled them when they became "politically incorrect"?
Under what circumstances should the government uproot existing legal frameworks, and what process should be followed in doing so?
> Should the government have refused to make those agreements?
Absolutely.
> If so, should the government have tried to compel all Indians to live in towns, and continued war against tribes who refused?
No, they should be free to live wherever they like, just like any other US citizen. The US Government could even have granted land to individuals; instead of declaring the "Navajo Reservation" belonging to the "Navajo Tribe", they could have divvied up that territory into individual allotments and granted each member of that tribe at the time an equally sized lot (by some lottery scheme I guess since not all blocks are equally desirable). The land would be full freehold, equally sellable to anyone.
But that way it would be freehold land owned by individuals under the laws of the USA and the underlying states, not some weird arrangement where the land has some make-believe sovereignty assigned to some weird pseudo-racial group and yet nobody in particular owns it so it doesn't get used for anything useful.
We have similar problems in Australia. The 4000 Pitjantjatjara people collectively own a chunk of land the size of South Korea, which should make them rich as fuck (even if it's not the best land). But they can't do anything useful with it because it belongs somehow to "all of them" in some pseudo-Communist approach. If the land were divided equally and every one of them got 25 square kilometres of desert to use or farm or sell as they see fit, it would be a lot better for everybody.
I'm not sure how you got where you are in Australia, but the US government wasn't strong enough to impose its will on all the Indians living west of the Mississippi River in the late 19th century. At the same time, they wanted to allow settlers to move into the areas where these tribes lived. In the 1870s and 1880s, I think most Indians' attitude was "We have rights to the lands where we hunt - you have no right to sell it to farmers who want to move in. As long as you keep the farmers out, there will be no trouble."
The solution arrived at was to negotiate with the tribes to allow settlers in some areas while reserving other areas for Indians to live as they wanted. Given that these agreements were made (and often violated), most people think the government should honor its commitments.
I think you're right that the tribal members would be better served by allowing more private ownership of land on the reservations, which generally isn't allowed. Dissolving the tribes and treating all US citizens as "only" US citizens probably appeals to cosmopolitan educated individualists, but I'm not sure that's a reason to impose it.
In the US, tribal members are free to leave the reservations and live as normal citizens in towns and cities, buying and selling land, working as employees or building businesses, or doing anything else citizens do. In some sense they'd be better off materially if they did so, but maintaining tribal ties is important to many, and maintaining tribal sovereignty is an important thing to them.
It would be a lot better for land speculators. I'll forgive you for not knowing much about Native American history, but that was actually tried. It was called the Dawes Act of 1887, and it was probably the most harmful piece of legislation since the Indian Removal Act.
Turns out if you tell people with centuries-old traditions of communal land use that they now "own" small plots of land, on which they are currently living in poverty, but don't give them access to development capital or anything else they might need to succeed, they tend to sell those small plots to land speculators and buy food and clothing so they can survive.
Ok what if Trump tries your approach, but then the Supreme Court reiterates like in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGirt_v._Oklahoma that the government must follow the commitments it made in treaties with Indian tribes (which is like 99% what would happen in reality). Would you support ignoring the courts or having some tribal lands with tribal colleges.
And even if you think courts and the rule of law is dumb are you at least sympathetic to other people thinking “yeah we should not overthrow the judiciary and honor treaties and it seems like supporting tribal colleges is pretty good at educating this otherwise underserved population that Purdue University probably isn’t expanding too soon”
I was going to make a similar comment to Brian. Clearly you are not aware of the legal status of Native American nations and how that differs from other USA minority groups. The US government has treaties and cannot and could not just "chuck them out" even if we don't like them now. There are controversies over how tribal membership is defined, but that doesn't change the fact that enrolled tribal members are citizens of their tribe and have rights and entitlements that pertain to them due to that status that were established by treaties with the US government. If we want to make changes now, they would need to be renegotiated just like we would with any other sovereign entity.
OK, can vs should. Yes, the currently administration can try to do a lot of things that break the constitution, treaties, laws, etc. It is still unclear whether they will get away with it. I hope they don't.
For "should", I believe that ultimately the rule of law is an important principle and that breaking treaties is wrong, and until the most recent administration the country was also largely governed in this way regardless of political party. The rapid erosion of this social norm is staggering.
Federally recognized tribes are autonomous political entities with their own citizenship laws: however you feel about blood quantum rules (which are very controversial and not in use by all tribes) they're no worse than the more restrictive sorts of jus sanguinis.
Should we also eliminate state universities because the idea that certain chunks of land belong to certain states is straight up jingoism? We should chuck out all non-universal governments along with slavery and D.E.I.
Okay, fine, there shouldn't be tribes or reservations or anything. I'll go with that.
Now, how do we fix it?
One way is to gradually dismantle the old institutions and while making sure that the people who rely on them can either use the existing good institutions or new institutions you create.
Another way is to whip out your dick and just start spraying at people who were relying on the old system because they weren't smart enough to predict your mental model of what would be moral.
" The idea of special privileges or chunks of land belonging to members of certain groups by virtue of their ancestors having been a special race is straight-up racism"
Reading this, I must suspect you of never having learned ANY 18th or 19th century U.S. history. That is NOT what tribal lands are or why they were established. Just for you, an abbreviated summary of the relevant bits of North American history:
1. Between 4 and 5 centuries ago, various European groups started setting the Americas. This caused some issues because the Americas already HAD lots of people living there. Sometimes they would establish friendly relationships and trade with these people. Other times they would murder them in order to take their land. Sometimes they would spread diseases to them accidentally. Other times they would spread diseases to them deliberately. A couple hundred years of this resulted in a dense concentration of European settlements along the East Coast of North America.
2. Eventually, a group of those settlements broke off from their home country of Britain and formed a new nation.
3. Over the years, that nation kept expanding westward and southward. This still caused some issues because much of the continent was still inhabited by people who weren't part of this nation, and weren't of European descent.
4. Not to be bothered by this, the colonists would threaten and often murder the inhabitants of any land they wanted so they could take it for themselves. When the displaces peoples would retaliate (or their neighbors would, believing--correctly as it turned out--that they would be next) the colonists would murder more of them.
5. This gradual but fairly continual spree of murder and theft didn't *quite* extend so far as deliberately wiping out all of the people the colonists were displacing. But of course, neither were the colonists particularly interested in having any of these people living on the *same* lands as them, because ew, no, clearly they can't do that. But being as they were (quite clearly, even to themselves) gradually heading towards occupying a large contiguous chunk of the continent, this created a conundrum. Where *should* these people-whose-land-they-were-entitled-to live?
6. The solution to this conundrum that largely won out is a policy of what would today be called "ethnic cleansing;" the previous inhabitants were removed en masse from all the land the colonists wanted. Of course, a lot of that was still done by means of murder, but some small patches of marginal land (chosen by the colonists, of course) were set aside so to allow for the less-murderous sort of ethnic cleansing where you merely force people off their land at gunpoint.
7. Fancying itself a nation of laws, the growing nation would often write down its policies towards those pieces of marginal land and their inhabitants in the form of laws or treaties. But despite the fiction of being bilateral, of course it didn't feel compelled to *keep* those polices: what a silly notion. So these patches of land sort of ended up with a status of being "self governing, except when we decide otherwise."
8. Eventually, long after this was all crystalized, some silly people started to *slowly*, *gradually* adopt the notion that a nation of laws maybe *ought* to generally stick to its laws and treaties, even in cases where it was powerful enough to break them with impunity. Though even then, it's not like they remained perfectly inviolate.
So you see, the idea that tribal lands are "special privileges or chunks of land belonging to members of certain groups by virtue of their ancestors having been a special race" is WILDLY a-historical. Unless you consider "living where we tell you in exchange for not being murdered" a "special privilege" in which case I'm not sure we have any way to communicate with one another. And the idea that these lands having this status and history is a "woke" idea is...well, let's just say I'm glad that people are so generous in offering evidence to my assertion that "woke" is a pretty meaningless word.
The status of these lands in nothing more or less than the mess the ancestors of the current U.S. polity left them with. If their ancestors had been more murderous there would be no tribal lands because there would be nobody to inhabit them. If they'd been less racist, native communities would have been integrated (forcibly, mind you) into the nation as it grew. If they'd been *less* rapacious the current U.S. would be much smaller and it would share a continent with several other nations. But none of that is changeable without a time machine. One could, of course, advance various coercive policies to change the current status quo to a different one: forcibly integrating these peoples NOW or something like that. But doing that because of a complaint that the current status quo is, uh "straight-up racism" would be...I'm not sure "hypocrisy" is a strong enough term.
"The idea of special privileges or chunks of land belonging to members of certain groups by virtue of their ancestors having been a special race "
I should note here that I'm a bit biased, since *I too* was born with special privileges and chunks of land--much bigger and better chunks than any native reservation--by virtue of the identity of my ancestors. The term for it is "U.S. citizenship." Honest question, would you consider that scheme racist? If so, what would your preferred alternative be?
(And yes, I do mean "honest question." I'm quite open to the notion that people shouldn't be given special privileges due to their circumstances of birth, as long as it's applied evenhandedly.)
Given that tribal reservations are the territory of sovereign groups, why should they not have tribal colleges? I assume you have no objection to state colleges; why should tribes not be allowed to establish colleges for their members?
even some municipalities (notably, NYC) fund public colleges! In some hypothetical situation where tribal status was completely abolished, there would still be a bunch of municipalities in the middle of nowhere, often speaking minority languages, and whose people would benefit from public education...
I used to work on auto-tagging systems at the World Bank. There were often “hot topics” people felt obligated to wedge into their reports, so one of the purposes of what we were doing was to tease out papers that were actually about “gender” or “green energy” from all the ones that just tossed the phrase in there to score points or check boxes. Everyone knew this was a thing people tended to do, not maliciously but to make their work sound more impactful by pointing out relatively minor effects. This was fifteen years ago.
I don’t really expect rigor from people generating lists like this, or expect them to care about the end product being accurate since that probably wasn’t the point and they’re immune to embarrassment. I’m just pointing out that if you did want to build a better list like this, you could probably do it a lot faster and easier than I did with some combination of existing vocabularies and AI.
In all the DOGE discourse, a line I've been hearing quite often is "while there's certainly a lot of inefficiency and waste in the Government, the executive branch isn't allowed to cut the budget for anything, only the legislature can do that".
I'm not sure if that's actually true or not, constitutionally, but if it is then it's insane. Why? Because if you rely on the legislature to figure out what budgets should be cut, then this is the quality of work that they come up with. The Legislative branch has a small number of staff. Half of them are lawyers, and the other half are secretaries. They don't have the resources to make sensible decisions about what should and shouldn't be cut, so the best they're going to come up with is some kind of bullshit find-the-keywords list like this.
I don't think Ted Cruz's staff are particularly incompetent by Congressional staff standards, I just think that this is the best you're likely to get.
So, the actual answer is much more complicated than anyone is pretending. But generally, there's two different things that are getting conflated. First there's stuff like the existence of departments, their missions and funding. The executive doesn't just get to decide 'eh, nah, let's not have an SEC,' when congress created it and provides it ongoing funding.
But, for specific things, the question of how to go about them is usually within the discretion of the executive. And especially for something like a grant program, the usual way it works is that congress appropriates X dollars for grants for some general purpose and then the agency has rules for how it will evaluate those grants and discretion in how to create those rules and which grants to fund (and, usually authority to cancel grants under some circumstances).
But, since there are usually outside parties relying on funds which have been granted/guaranteed, there's requirements that have to be followed before termination, outside fairly rare circumstances/emergencies.
Now, if Congress thinks a grant program is bad, or wants some specific thing to be barred, they can simply either not fund it next year (remember, most funding is happening on a yearly basis for ongoing programs, so they've got lots of bites at the apple for this and are already making a decision, every year, to fund it or not) or pass specific legislation adjusting what the rules for the grants are.
Note, I am not a grants officer, none of this is legal advice, just a general description of what's going on.
In addition to what EC-2021 said, deciding what the budget gets spent on is and always has been a huge part of Congress's job. If Congress doesn't have enough of the right kind of staff to do this job adequately, then one of the first things they should be spending money on is more staff.
I think the evidence so far points to DOGE not being any better. And I say that as someone whose first knee-jerk response to your comment was to think that if the budget is so large and complex that congress can't manage it, then it should be reduced until they can. So I'm very onboard with the idea that the federal government does (and there fore pays for/budgets) _far_ too many things.
I just don't buy the idea that the executive branch will do any better.
Why not? Technocrat liberals have been beating the drum about how great it would be to have well-funded professional staffers, but the problem is ideological: politicians don’t want to look like exemplars of government overspending.
A competent and well-funded legislature should absolutely be able to do most of the work, and to provide oversight where needed. It’s only the current zeitgeist that shuts it down.
Funding Congressional staff specifically is probably unpopular for the same reason that Congress voting themselves a pay raise is unpopular - it looks like self-dealing even if you actually do need the money!
(And the Congressional Research Service is pretty obscure so it's hard to make the case for how important it is for Congress.)
Counterpoint, Elon Musk has pretty much unlimited access to Federal government expertise and the ability to hire any staff he could possibly want, and he's still apparently responding to random things people on Twitter misidentify in publicly-available data. So it's not like it's a slam-dunk in that direction either.
Yeah, Elon's not stupid, so there's no way he's not being deliberately obtuse here.
With that said, I won't shed a tear for the Department of Education. The most charitable interpretation I can find for their budget allocation is that it was fuelling credential inflation.
It's not untrue to say that there's a lot of pointless and/or ideologically nefarious spending in the budgets of western governments, and it's true that a lot of the senior management in these institutions were doing an end-run around executive mandates, and it's also true that we can't go through another half-century of taxes being cut while the welfare state continues to balloon and our kids are indoctrinated into hating their own cultures.
Something like this had to happen. I just wish the cuts and firings were a bit more surgical in various areas.
(Admittedly, the left is correct that raising taxes on the top 1-10% is probably overdue and the economic gains of this group over the past half-century can't be explained purely as a function of IQ diffs. But we don't always get to pick our policies from a menu.)
The only thing that we could realistically cut to balance the budget are Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and defense spending. The NSF is not a meaningful cost-saving target, AND the benefits of scientific research on economic growth may well make it, in aggregate, a negative saving.
Inflation-adjusted public education spending in the US has expanded by at least a factor of 4x since the 1970s, with marginal returns in terms of reading, math or science literacy, so I imagine there's quite a bit of room for trimming the fat here.
There's also no correlation between hours of schoolwork and PISA scores within the developed world, and no correlation between health spending and health outcomes. Which suggests that outcomes here are mainly driven by genetic and lifestyle factors external to the health and education systems.
Conservatives sometimes point out that the cost of *elective* surgeries have plummetted relative to the costs of public healthcare over the past 40 years or so (I think I watched a Larry Elder video on the topic at some point), so it's entirely possible that taking an axe to the OECD's health sector and just funding a basic income so people can just pay for their own doctors would greatly improve health services on net. But I'll admit to not having deep expertise on the subject.
This is part of the problem with America's system of government. The soft fusion of executive and legislative power that exists in most(?) other first world countries- Australia, UK, New Zealand, Germany, etc. is much preferable for many reasons, one of them is that reviewing extremely complex budgets and putting them through the legislature works best if the dominant faction in the legislature is in control of the executive, and hence the public service and thus can review this stuff and has the capacity for institutional governance and design.
The other good reason not to separate them is so that the public *KNOW WHO TO BLAME WHEN STUFF ISN'T GOING WELL*. In a strongly adversarial system, the party that doesn't hold executive power has an incentive to block everything and create the impression that nothing is going well- thus encouraging low-information voters to vote for the party out of power, rewarding them for their intransigence.
The separation of executive and legislature is a disaster that unfortunately happened to be a trendy idea at just the wrong point in history.
I occasionally see analogous arguments for "just have a monarchy, at least you can storm the palace when the king fucks up", but last I checked storming the palace didn't work out so hot for MAGA (or in Tianenmen Square), so I'm pretty skeptical about this approach.
I also don't see a ton of evidence that the underlying social problems here are less pronounced or were responded to in a more timely fashion in the UK or Germany.
In fact, the US has been massively more successful than Europe or anywhere else in the world. Which is why it's such a big deal that Trump and Musk are trying to fuck it all up in a way that no past president of either party has contemplated.
I think much of the Trump/Vance/Musk agenda is both urgently needed and entirely justified in terms of democratic mandate, I just get annoyed when people put forward certain autocratic/monopartisan governments as supposedly superior alternatives to division of powers.
At the same time, one should be cautious about attributing US success to it's system of government (Liberia has a virtually identical written constitution, for example.) I think the main reason why the US is wealthier than other western countries is brain drain, followed by geographic factors, and neither of those actually scales at a global level.
I agree that the US's success is not due to paper. It's due to a system of institutions, norms, and laws that took many decades to establish and which Trump and Musk are rapidly destroying.
Speaking of brain drain, if you're worried about brain drain, surely capriciously ending most science funding is the LAST thing you want to do. Even a "pause" in the grants is forcing labs to close and scientists to find other jobs, and that's not something you can just undo later, even if you want to.
Building things is hard and time consuming, while destroying can be done in an instant.
They're not wrong about the norms and institutions being ideologically corrupted. Wokeness/DEI is essentially just civil rights, which has been woven deeply into the fabric of american government for at least 50 years.
> Speaking of brain drain, if you're worried about brain drain, surely capriciously ending most science funding is the LAST thing you want to do...
Mostly I want those scientists to go back to their home countries and open labs and invent things there. (I would also like the wealthiest countries with the most talent and technology to use their resources and expertise to increase their birthrates and start *exporting* talent to the rest of the planet, which is what would happen in a sane world.)
I also thought it was a bit strange that the people deciding what to spend money on don't also decide how to do it. But I don't necessarily agree with:
>In a strongly adversarial system, the party that doesn't hold executive power has an incentive to block everything and create the impression that nothing is going well- thus encouraging low-information voters to vote for the party out of power, rewarding them for their intransigence.
For example, the Reps blocked the Dem immigration bill that might have alleviated some of the inflow of migrants, helping the Reps win and take stronger actions against migrants than the Dems would have had they won. So far, voters seem to approve, demonstrating that the block contributed to a better outcome, at least on migration
I think you are getting confused between cutting budgets vs. cutting programs.
The legislature sets the budget that they want to spend on an issue. 'We think protecting voting rights is worth $24B/year and that's how much we want you to spend on it'. The legislature gets to decide what the priorities are and how important they are in this way, teh Executive doesn't get to just say 'actually I think voting rights aren't important, I'm only going to spend $2m on it and put the rest in a sock drawer'.
However, the Executive is in charge of using that money to implement actual programs to achieve the goal, and they can cut or add or alter programs within the guidelines set by the legislature more or less as they see fit. So they can cut a program that's not working and funnel that into a more effective effort on the same topic, as long as they're ultimately pursuing the agenda and budgets set by the legislature.
What are you saying, then? Trump has to take the ~270 billion allocated to the DoEd and spend it on education some other way? How does he accomplish any actual cost-cutting?
The President can't achieve cost cutting. Congress sets the budget. It's a Constitutional crisis if the executive intentionally doesn't follow the budget that the legislature has mandated by law. This is why the federal judges are ordering that spending continue, because the rationale for cuts doesn't seem like "we think this particular program is bad so we're reassigning the money" which could be resonable, but rather a broad-strokes redirection of budgeting.
The President can make things more efficient and get better outcomes with the same money, work with legislators using the bully pulpit to get his vision of the budget passed, and veto budgets he doesn't want. But not change the law (unless the judges say he can, we'll see)
By working across the aisle with Congress, like Biden did to pass various bills that were ideologically aligned with his values. Republicans already won't impeach Trump no matter what, and he's criminally immune for most actions he will take, so he's already in the best spot for leverage.
Obviously Trump will squander this moment like when he had both houses of Congress in his first term, instead focusing on consolidating executive power for himself and engaging in unconstitutional actions like impoundment and disobeying courts.
I'm still waiting to see if Trump will deliver on mass deportations or any substantive cuts of federal spending (USAID and even the department of education are drops in the bucket, relatively speaking), so you're right that he may well squander this moment.
I'm kinda skeptical that impoundment is especially unconstitutional, though?
One should also bear in mind that many provisions within the various US civil rights acts violate constitutional principles such as freedom of association, so there's plenty of finger-pointing to go around.
The reason there are isolated instances of impoundment by Presidents throughout history is because there doesn't need to be 100% autistic adherence to laws - a functioning government is one where the branches act in good faith, reciprocate norms, and respect the power that competing branches have, sometimes engaging in minor power plays, sometimes allowing minor plays. Nixon severely abused that leeway, which is why the Impoundment Act was passed, and why every single challenge to it in court has resulted in judges and justices reiterating that without the power of the purse, Congress's laws are merely advisory to the President, which is why giving Presidents the unchecked power of impoundment completely undermines article 2 of the Constitution, and that the only way Presidents can impound funds is subject to Congress's lawmaking.
I seriously doubt your characterization of provisions in the Civil Rights Act as being unconstitutional, considering it has even longer precedence than the Impoundment Act, and has been upheld by various court rulings since its passing, like the Impoundment Act.
As a former Fed with budget authority you are wrong on that one first one. We have complete executive discretion to NOT execute the funds and simply return the budget to Treasury at end of year. Historically that was a career ender as the President expected you to execute his budget requests and agency heads hated getting grilled by Congress for not spending their money BUT as long as the President and Agency Head are willing to back you up, they can basically just refuse to execute under the guise of fraud, waste, and abuse, namely waste in this example.
If GS-11 Jane doesn't need a screwdriver, there is no law that will arrest her for not submitting a fraudulent procurement request under the FAR for a new wasteful screwdriver. People miss in practice how the budget is actually executed, one FAR request at a time tens of millions times a year. If nobody submits a request, no money is executed, as simple as that. And those requests come from the rank and file, not leadership.
I get what you mean but I think that's different from the President deciding to withhold funds or shut down agencies.
Maybe the President could fire everyone at an agency and replace them with people who don't think they agency should exist and they can all simultaneously say that they don't need any money this year thank you very much.
But AFAIK the The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 prevents the President from just withholding funds from agencies and programs he doesn't like. Or at least that such acts have to be immediately reported to Congress and the president has to abide by Congress telling him to stop it.
Correct but the President can simply direct his employees to NOT submit any procurement requests or direct the procurement approving officials to simply not approve any on pains of firing for cause under insubordination. That isn't withholding funds, that's simply doing something Presidents and Agency Heads rarely do, actually supervise and direct their subordinates.
Applying for grants at a research university is wonky at best. Challenging accepted science does not make to many friends. When I was helping with gender differentiation studies, the corner stone of research, you find hunter gather evidence every time you look. If I needed the money, it would have been to easy to add the statement ….. “which could help promote women to higher positions etc…” to almost any project
So, of the $2.05 billion awarded by the NSF during the Biden-Harris administration that Senator Ted Cruz accused of being woke, only 40% * $2.05 billion = $.82 billion was for woke programs.
This is like the finding after the release of the Venona files that only about half the large number of people that Senator Joseph McCarthy had accused of being Soviet agents were actually Soviet agents.
Yes, I suspect this is a problem that DOGE is going to run into pretty soon. Actually cutting government spending in a meaningful way is going to involve axing a lot of social programs that are not recognisably 'woke' or 'DEI' in the modern sense.
I mean we don't really know that 40% of the funding was going to wokeness or whatever. I would suspect that "non-woke" programs probably cost more money on average.
Comparing Marxism with critical social justice, it's easy to find big gaps in ideas and practices, which are papered over by right-wing publicists.
But one can also compare people. Consider sophisticated advocates of Marxism in the US in the 1920s-1960s. Think about where they tended to live, what sorts of things they majored in in university, what jobs they tended to have, how they tended to volunteer, what genres of literature they tended to read for pleasure, whether they tended to be atheists or believers, etc.
Now do the same for sophisticated advocates of critical social justice in the US today.
In terms of social class, are the sophisticated advocates for critical social justice today similar to the sophisticated advocates for Marxism back then?
I recall something Lenin said about social class in the new Bolshevik state: "The whole question is—who will overtake whom?"
No, it was primarily about the worldwide communism/capitalism fight. Which is kind of relevant here - old-style commies could be meaningfully accused of being Moscow's stooges, whereas the center of wokeness nowadays is America itself.
I can't answer this by reading the original Russian, but I can submit the following prompt to Perplexity.
>When Lenin used his famous question often shortened to "Who whom", was he talking about class conflict in territory under Bolshevik control, or about competition between the Bolshevik territory and capitalist-run countries?"
Here is Perplexity's answer. Note paragraph #2 explains what Lenin initially meant. Nothing else is relevant to the original meaning, but I include it for completeness.
>Lenin's famous question "Who whom?" (кто кого?) primarily referred to class conflict within society, but it also applied to the broader struggle between socialist and capitalist systems12.
>The phrase originated from Lenin's statement at the second All-Russian Congress of Political Education Departments in 1921: "The whole question is—who will overtake whom?"2. This formulation was initially used to describe the inevitability of class struggle within society, focusing on which class would dominate the other2.
>Lenin viewed all interactions as zero-sum, with one side gaining at the expense of the other1. This perspective applied to:
> Internal class conflict: The struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie within Soviet society12.
> International competition: The contest between the socialist system in the Soviet Union and capitalist countries45.
>Stalin later invoked the shortened form "who whom" in 1929, giving it an "aura of hard-line coercion" and emphasizing the struggle between the Soviet Union and capitalist powers25. He framed it as a question of whether the Soviet Union would defeat the capitalists or vice versa2.
>In essence, Lenin's "Who whom?" encapsulated both internal class dynamics and the broader ideological conflict between socialism and capitalism on the world stage
The really dedicated advocate of politically muscular "anti-wokeness" as exemplified by the Musk-Trump administration does not actually believe in a unified "America" as understood by people who have positive memories of high school civics class circa 2000 or so.
They believe in what, in a moment of candor, they might call "my America, but not <i>our</i> America." A definition of 'America' which includes only themselves and the people they perceive as being willing to help them get what they want.
For the oligarchs, this means "I am actually in charge, and the only real Americans are the ones I like, with the ones I can dupe into supporting me being vaguely relevant background figures and everyone else being collateral damage waiting to happen."
For the median voter who supports this kind of thing, it means "the real Americans are me, people I think are just like me, and of course the oligarchs I trust to destroy those I am told are to blame for all my problems."
Brown people, 'uppity' women who question the social order, nerds who talk about things like global warming as if they exist, and so forth... are not actually "Americans" in the mind of the kind of person who thinks the Musk-Trump administration is doing the right thing. Not really. Not in the way that I was taught to think of the definition of 'American' back in high school civics in the twentieth century.
>The really dedicated advocate of politically muscular "anti-wokeness" as exemplified by the Musk-Trump administration does not actually believe in a unified "America"
Sure, and neither do their leftist counterparts. But both sides claim to be patriotic, in their way, and I think they're largely honest about that.
"Is this person a Soviet Agent" is a pretty objective standard: either they're sending reports back to Moscow or they're not.
"Is this program woke" is by no means an objective standard. Even from Scott's good-faith reading, it *mostly* sounds like "affiliated with the social sciences" is the main thing being selected for, with some degree of political gloss. And I say that as a hard-science person with a LONG history of rolling his eyes at social-science silliness.
Now, it's a fair question what fraction of science funding should go towards social sciences. But turning that in to a debate over a trendy and largely-meaningless political buzzword may rank among the least productive ways to do that.
Addressing "Broader Impacts" is required in most NSF grants, including in the abstract. Broadening participation in science from those traditionally underrepresented (some races/ethnicities, those with disabilities, gender in some fields) is explicitly listed as a potential Broader Impact by the NSF. This has nothing to do with Biden; it's been in place for---literally---decades. It's definitely the case that the political trends of the last ~ decade have changed the focus of Broader Impacts in some fields, but this is nothing new. It is different than that case at other federal agencies, e.g., NASA, which do not have a long history of similar considerations and added them only recently, if at all.
Someone somewhere in this thread (how TF can anyone follow such a long thread?!) mentioned examples of broader impacts like "national security" or "increased economic competitiveness" or "increased well-being". I think this is what's bothering me about this whole debate. "National security" can refer (in for example DoD) grants to actions that support Ukraine (and thus strengthen NATO) or actions that support Israel (an ally, but also possibly lead to deaths in Gaza). (Or obviously to other things besides Ukraine or Israel). We can disagree about which side we support in either of these cases, but the laudable goal of improving national security doesn't itself bother us. "Increased economic competitiveness" *can* mean in polluting industries or in sustainable industries, but the phrase itself is laudable, no problem with it. "increased well-being" of ... whom exactly? Don't worry about it, no problem. These are all seen, somehow, as apolitical. But suddenly research that promises to specifically benefit underrepresented communities is A) outside the legitimate scientific scope and B) woke and therefore bullshit, and C) automatically divisive.
*Any* broader impact will imply some political or moral choice. I don't get why DEI concerns are sillier or more ridiculous than any other type of broader impact. Because they exclude some populations and don't improve the lives of everyone? Neither do the others.
Change "women and underrepresented minorities" to "men and whites." Not a big deal, right? Because every category favors some populations over others, it's perfectly fine to favor men and whites over others.
Not fine at all. Simply what's been done for hundreds of years. And which Trump et.al. now want to go back to, because hundreds of years wasn't enough for them. If you think elimination of DEI makes everything neutral, a level playing field, that's just a very naive and ahistorical viewpoint.
Wow! That provoked quite a response! But I think your very natural emotion shows that formally favoring and disfavoring racial groups is emotionally, politically, and morally different than vaguely favoring the abstract "populations" (as you put it) related to the other categories.
I think your more honest opinion is simply "I think it is good to formally discriminate against whites and men."
Oh. I didn't feel very emotional when I wrote it. Look, I will grant you there is a tension between addressing past *and continuing* inequities and avoiding creating new ones. It is very very difficult to accomplish, but it doesn't have to be zero-sum. You think my "honest" opinion is what you say; I think your honest one is that those past and continuing inequities (where non-white, non-male people have been subjugated) just aren't very important to you, especially if you might have to give something up, anything, even the tiniest privilege. I take back what I said: It doesn't sound like you want a level playing field, rather one that's tilted in your favor. But I see from your profile that you're liking posts praising JD Vance, so I doubt we will see eye to eye on this.
To understand why all these NSF grants have that final "woke" sentence, you need to understand that NSF grant applications include a Broader Impacts section in addition to the Scientific Merit section, with broader impacts potentially being a wide range of science education (eg, involving K12 teachers) and outreach -- not just specifically woke topics. This has been the case for much longer than the Biden-Harris administration and it is unfair to blame it on them even if you disagree that Broader impacts should be a criterion, or if you think that "woke" broader impacts in particular are inappropriate. Without understanding these constraints, the abstracts for NSF grants are going to seem odd, with a seemingly unrelated broader impacts sentence at the end.
If you just search "nsf broader impacts" on google you will get a whole page explaining the reasons for this requirement.
By evaluating every proposal it receives according to its intellectual merit and its broader impacts, NSF ensures that publicly funded research has tangible benefits to society that go beyond increasing knowledge.
Some quick additional web searches reveal that broader impacts were always part of NSF, but became an actual review criterion in 1997 (the conservative 90s!).
In some way Broader Impacts were actually intended to persuade conservatives that NSF research was worthwhile (it helps American competitiveness!), so it is ironic that this is now the piece being most attacked.
Having actually submitted and reviewed NSF grants, sometimes the broader impact projects are very good and have a great impact, other times it was clearly a last minute add on and isn't likely to do a lot. However, since it is a requirement, it isn't really fair to now criticize the grant writers for just doing what NSF required.
From a fellow scientists, these two comments are actually how the system works. A lot of other comments here are misunderstanding/mischaracterizing where the woke content comes in, what it's like, and what Biden had to do with it (the answer to that last one is absolutely nothing).
Yes, and I just caught up with the other comments, still a lot of people blaming it on Biden. I tried! Alas I have no more time to spend on the comments, have to go do some real scientist things like reviewing a manuscript for a journal, writing an Introduction section for a research paper, and sending feedback to my MS student on her latest draft.... sometimes I even review NSF grants, but don't currently have one on my plate.
I have an NSF CAREER grant that's been recommended for funding. I'm waiting on the Notice of Award so I can find out if I have to fire staff in two weeks. I can't even give them two weeks' notice because I might get the money!
All of these folks cheering what's going on should spend about a minute imagining what it would be like if they had to fire a junior scientist from their team because Ted Cruz or Elon Musk Ctrl+Fed them (ahem) and decided that their grant had Bad Words in it
Oh no, that is excruciating! I can't imagine... Sending you my best wishes, hope it all works out.
I've been "joking" lately that this is the first time in my life that I have actually been happy to not have US Federal funding. I work in China part time (USA the rest), and all my funding is from here. That has its own challenges of course... but the main focus is on producing solid research and publishing it in good quality journals, which is what I want to do no matter what country I am in. I also find myself feeling lucky that I am getting old and could retire any time if things get too bad. I have a lot of sympathy for younger colleagues; it wasn't easy for me, but it is much worse now.
Hang in there! I bet your Broader Impacts are great :), as well as your Scientific Merit of course.
Thank you for the kind words :) I’m on the other side of the arc, I’m young enough that I’m wondering whether I’ll really be able to (or want to) spend the rest of my career in the US. I’m at a leading institution, so it’s hard to think about leaving. At the same time, it’s quickly becoming unclear whether the US is going to have any leading institutions in another 20 years.
It’s encouraging to hear that your experience in China is that you can focus on the research!
If people doing good research were previously adding woke disclaimers "our research will help Black and Hispanic people, women too, and especially Black trans women" under duress in order to try to get funded, now they will simply stop. This is a good thing. (Also not pictured is all the equally good research that previously wasn't funded because the grant application writers didn't bend the knee).
I agree it is good to stop from here onward. I don't think it's necessary to light a billion dollars on fire (by canceling half-done projects) in order to send the message that you're now against this kind of thing.
I agree that when previous good research wasn't funded, that was also bad.
By the way, did we ever actually establish that everyone *did* have to throw their pinch of sentimental incense to women or racial minorities in order to get their grants approved by the Biden-era NSF? In the article I seem to recall that you only looked at the specific items Ted Cruz had already singled out, and he assuredly wouldn't have gone looking for any grant proposals that LACKED that pinch of incense.
So as far as I know, it could be that up to 90% of the successful grant proposals include no such incense, which rather calls into question the proposition of "Biden made everyone sacrifice to 'wokeness' and this is very bad."
I agree that lighting a billion dollars on fire for fun isn't a good idea, but would make the following points:
- Close to half of the projects appear to already be finished, so nothing would be lit on fire there
- It is far from clear that the plan is to cancel all the listed grants. The link explicitly says "Chairman Cruz has requested significant scrutiny of awards listed in the database." Scrutiny is good. Your analysis would suggest that 40-60% of the awards should stand up to said scrutiny.
- To the extent that money hasn't been spent yet, it will be available for spending on something else (so the loss is much less than 100%). And/or the original recipients can do a few hours work to reapply without the woke language.
Add these three together and the stakes are likely dramatically smaller.
Iirc, you've also noted previously the dominance of tit-for-tat strategies. If one side completely corrupts a process for ideological ends, "ok, back to normal from now" leaves the original wrongdoing unpunished. There's no incentive to not immediately do the same next time. Some level of punishment for those who did this and benefitted from doing so is probably optimal.
Also, on a personal note. I'm a researcher. I've refused to bend the knee and add nonsense woke stuff to grant applications. I've had pointless bureaucratic administrators add months of delay because of insistence of adding woke things to studies. I must admit I have limited sympathy to those who increased their chances of winning grants by caving to this stuff (if more of them had refused, it would not have spread through the system so easily).
So what got the pointless bureaucratic administrators to drop their demand that you add woke features to studies? In my experience it is pointless to talk to bureaucrats about what's fair and sensible, because they don't reference those concepts when making decisions. The reference the rules.
I'm not inclined to go into too much detail (anonymity, sorry), but in very general terms:
- bureaucrats are apparently fond of adding criteria that are not actually stated in the rules, they are just their crazy reinterpretation of said rules. (A good example of this is Title VI - for 60 years there has been a law stated by congress that very clearly said "universities that take federal funding can't discriminate based on race in anything they do" which university administration decided to interpret as "but actually, we really want to, so we can"). Still, as you say, you're still fighting with *them* about *their* crazy interpretation of said rules, so redress is limited in the very short term.
- you can imagine a situation where (to be able to measure something you want to measure) you want to ask question A. The bureaucrat decides they don't like this, and says you have to ask A' instead. (In this case, A' was not merely some woke formulation, it also would not capture the same thing, and thus would have yielded useless data).
- They might be able to stop you from asking A, but they probably can't make you do A', you can likely choose to do neither. (Which of course is bad. They've actively made the research less informative).
In my neck of the woods, SMALL grants under the NSF's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) have so far allowed me to avoid forced DEI documents in the form of Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC, which is very different than the standard "Broader Impacts" section of a proposal), see:
BPC has also been pushed at department level by NSF and CRA, where creating committees to establish department-wide BPC documents is common. It's been revised recently, likely due to the recent EO, but see:
The last time I (politely) raised concerns about compelling our department's faculty members to participate in BPC activities (tying it to to the annual-review process), I was called a racist. I still managed to nix this stuff after working with a couple fellow faculty members, but it was stressful, time-consuming (on top of my normal job obligations), and at least one colleague won't talk with me anymore.
Anyway, we didn't police ourselves well, and now we get the backlash. Sure, it'd be great to avoid collateral damage (e.g., potential, massive cuts to the NSF's budget), but in my opinion anyone expecting a nuanced response after a decade (?) of DEI bullying is delusional.
If Congress does not repeal or amend Title 42, which (as several scientists have observed) actually requires NSF grant applicants to discuss the broader societal impacts of their work, or a court case does not rule said law unconstitutional, then nobody has stopped anything. They are just still running the election instead of running the country.
There’s confusion about whether NSF grants with “DEI language” are getting canceled. They aren’t—at least not right now. A federal court issued a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) that the DOJ says applies to all NSF awards, so funds are still flowing.
However, we’ve been told to comply with new Executive Orders regarding DEIA content. In my own NSF grant, that basically means I’m scrapping the local high-school panel I had planned at an upcoming career day. If you want details, here’s the TRO: (https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/TRO-NY-v-Trump-1.31.25.pdf).
Basically the best solution is now in practice--the real science still gets done and the DEI stuff gets skipped.
"Also not pictured is all the equally good research that previously wasn't funded because the grant application writers didn't bend the knee"
Evidence that this exists?
I'm aware that the oh-so-edgy "bend the knee" phrasing makes it sound like a heroic act of defiance. But I'm extremely skeptical that anyone who thinks not inserting a throwaway sentence or two into their grant applications is a worthwhile hill for their time and effort to die on is capable of producing any worthwhile research anyway. And that skepticism has nothing at all to do with the political valence of the throwaway sentences: this sort of silly cultural baggage exists in a great many contexts (yes, some of them right-coded) and being unable or unwilling to navigate it seems like a pretty crippling weakness in almost any collaborative context.
>But I'm extremely skeptical that anyone who thinks not inserting a throwaway sentence or two into their grant applications is a worthwhile hill for their time and effort to die on is capable of producing any worthwhile research anyway.
If someone's willing to pander in a grant application, she's probably not amazingly devoted to the truth, which devalues any reports she produces.
"If someone's willing to pander in a grant application, she's probably not amazingly devoted to the truth"
Wow. This is...this is one great big ol' disconnect here. I think if someone uttered this sentence to my face I would have laughed out loud. Either you and I live in VERY different worlds or this is QUITE the isolated demand for rigor.
In my world, people who are that level of "amazingly devoted to the truth" go off and find a comfortable cave to live as hermits. Not necessarily because "hermithood" is the best way they can possible pursue the truth, but because they have literally no other job prospects. None.
Personally, I am made of much more cowardly stuff. When I'm having a holiday meal with my extended family and somebody says grace, I don't pipe up with a long-winded explanation of why *clearly* God does not exist. When somebody working a customer service job tells me to "have a nice day" I don't reply with "you clearly don't care about what kind of day I have, so kindly drop the pretense." On the few occasions that I worked such jobs, I didn't tell people "I don't care at all what sort of day you have, and won't think about you ever again once you walk out the door." When I'm writing cover letters for a job application, I talk up my strengths and decline to mention my more embarrassing moments: I certainly don't *lie* mind you, but anybody who doesn't realize a cover letter is 95% pandering (with the remaining 5% being your contact info) has QUITE a set of blinders on.
Don't get me wrong, the truth is very important. Sticking up for the truth CAN be one of the most important things you ever do, if you have halfway-decent judgement. But the sort of person who would decide to Take a Brave and Noble Stand for the Truth when they're filling out bullshit paperwork certainly can't have got the education to do worthwhile science in any case: they can't even have got the education to move out of their parents' basement (not until they find a decent cave anyway).
I feel tangentially obligated to nitpick that, as a retail grunt, some of us do actually care about whether you're having a nice day (even after you've left the store). Customer-facing stuff is, uh, not my strong area, but the same autist tendencies also drive towards optimization...so honest to God* I still ruminate now and then about times I fucked up bigly and made a customer's experience worse, years ago. Gotta do better! It's true that this is an outlier, and stereotypes of disinterested retail exist for a reason...but I'm sorry nonetheless that you've been soured into cynicism from shitty (dis)service. Not enough followers of Abadar to go around, these days.
(It's true though, anyone who can't at least even pretend to try to care about others is gonna have a hard time getting and staying hired in such jobs. I'd like to think my employer is a bit more discerning at picking out higher quality sociopaths. We Have Standards Here, damnit.)
If her research topic is infected with a bunch of woke concepts she doesn’t even think are valid, then yeah that’s pandering. if it’s on cancer or other things unrelated to Woke, then why isn’t sticking in a token woke sentence about how treating this cancer will benefit minorities in the same category as Mozart flattering his patron?
There is no evidence that you would accept. Any proposals that were rejected for not including it (which, yes, I DO think is "a heroic act of defiance"), you would simply declare it's because the people applying were too stupid to produce what you would consider "worthwhile research."
I second the interpretation that this guy you are responding to is not interested in evidence, and would not accept any that is provided. When you start with "anyone who would oppose this and not cave out of personal integrity can't do good research" I don't think you're actually engaging in good faith.
Why not share what evidence you have, and even if it doesn't satisfy the person you're replying to, it might satisfy or at least influence other readers?
At no point in my life have I ever believed that either illness or unemployment made a person worthless or inferior. In fact, I rather strongly believe that your personal struggles deserve support, compassion and understanding, as do everyone's.
But for all that, I'm not above mentioning pretty staggering irony here. Do you see it? It's not subtle. Here you being on my case because my (apparently) my honest framing of the issue was not woke enough for you. Beautiful.
I've made it quite clear that I don't want to talk to you, so your whining about respect is pretty hollow. I suppose I'll probably have to just block you, since you're either unable or unwilling to abide by that boundary.
Oh I think Im the sane one and I could easily find some offensive political memes that ive reshared would get me fired from my jobs in current year that would (probably) make ya hate me
I tend to have a low tolerance for bullshit, its not going well for me; I want to put you to make an uncomfortable choice; Im not usually called stupid, either Im being kicked out for my socail failing and thats worth it or the system suck and it shouldnt
When you filter for anything beside meritocracy, you will lose some amount of talent. Make your choice, is it worth it to you?
"When you filter for anything beside meritocracy, you will lose some amount of talent. Make your choice, is it worth it to you?"
YES! Emphatically, resoundingly, unquestionably yes. A thousand times yes. It is EXTREMELY worth it. It wouldn't even be possible to MAKE such a choice in a world that filtered purely on "talent" because such a world could never have anything as elaborate as a university, a corporation or a nation-state.
In case the point is lost on you, THE most important power humans have is our power of *working together.* Nothing in our lives would be possible without it. Even if it were possible to filter *purely* for talent, no organization of any size could possibly function that way. Talent is very important in many fields, but you are generally MUCH better off with people who are merely *very talented* but also capable of working well with others than finding more talented[1] people who can only work well alone. Science is a collaborative endeavor. So are most other things humans do.
If I'm reading him right, then, none of this has to do with the POLITICAL right or left.
Let me say clearly that I don't think not working well with others is a moral failing of any stripe and I genuinely want to build a world where people who with that deficit can live comfortable and fulfilling lives. But basic social skills still need to be a very high priority for any sort of practical endeavor.
[1] But usually only slightly more, because when you're already on the far-right (EDIT: as in "far in the positive direction" nothing to do with left-right in the political sense) end of the distribution, moving even further right is quite costly.
> But usually only slightly more, because when you're already on the far-right end of the distribution, moving even further right is quite costly.
Not really; it truely is insufferable to be inside the politically correct bubble. The trade off of facists posting videos of accidental suicides, (got to say my least favorite genre of gore posting) is easily worth it. I love untethered arguments and how they do just.... resolve; compared to the drama of elsewhere.
"Anyone who thinks differently to me on this issue is incapable of doing good research, and reveals themselves unable to work in collaborative environments" says area man who goes on to accuse others of "character attacks".
I'm not quite sure what else someone insisting that I definitely won't evaluate the evidence (that they haven't actually provided) could be.
As for the rest, put up or shut up. If your position has merit, you'll be able to support it with something more than bad-faith summaries of others' responses. Show me some of this potentially-excellent research that isn't getting funded.
Well, yes. That's exactly my point. Suppose you're doing good research and you need a grant to continue it. You apply for the grant. The directions for applying say "The application should include a statement that says X."
Even if you firmly believe ¬X, is "sticking up for the truth" on one line of a grant application that nobody beside the grant committee is ever going to read the most important thing you should be doing? Or is following the directions and getting your grant and continuing your research MORE important? Do you want to die on the hill of never, ever saying "X" even in a stupid context where the statement costs you nothing and the refusal costs you everything? Or do you want to keep your eyes on the prize of getting your research done?
Note that I am NOT taking a position here on whether "The application should include a statement that says X" is a reasonable part of the grant application. It may be, it may not be (it depends on both what X actually is, and the wider context). But even for X where it isn't it is *usually* a pretty damn easy requirement to meet. So I'm very skeptical that there is any substantial number of otherwise-good scientists whose careers have been derailed by such a requirement.
What about scientists who aren't politically savvy enough to know about the shibboleths they need to say to not be committing "A HEROIC ACT OF DEFIANCE!" Must navigating woke politics be a required skill for unrelated scientific research?
That is QUITE a different question. The original was asking "what about people who know what the grant requirements are and refuse to follow them on principle?" You're asking "what if the grant requirements are unclear and some otherwise good scientists don't understand them?"
To be as clear as possible: I am NOT taking any position on whether the current requirements are either clear or reasonable. But if the main issue somebody has with the requirements are "they require applicants to write some silly things that don't perfectly reflect their beliefs," that is an *incredibly* tiny, silly, unimportant issue. "The requirements are unclear to the point some good applicants fail to meet them" is potentially a much more serious issue. But really we *should* be bringing in actual evidence before discussing *either issue.*
I’m fairly sure they *won’t* “simply stop”. Instead they will try to guess what the new political correctness is, and add sentences like “make America great” into unrelated research about blood cell proteins or whatever. There will be new knees bent, and they will be ones that understand that their funding can’t be saved by doing science, but only by being politically correct.
I find it plausible that phrases like "restore American dynamism" and "strengthen American resolve" and "keep the US ahead of its great-power competitors" will become common in applications that have something to do with national competitiveness, which can include many aspects of health.
But I find it implausible that they will become common in applications that have nothing to do with national competitiveness. And I find it implausible that a shibboleth like "make America great" will become common in any sort of application.
If Musk stays in charge of the country for long enough to affect a round or two of grant applications, everyone will quickly learn what words the grant boards are looking for and put them in.
This (or at least the meaningful version*) is one of the most ridiculous predictions I have ever heard. I would be stunned if in 4 years time American academia is broadly considered to be "more hospitable to conservatives than progressives, to favour whites and males and conservatives in hiring / promotions / grant applications at the expense of equally capable women / minorities / progressives, to police normie left wing speech more aggressively than normie right wing speech and so forth".
If you really believe this, you should make a public bet with someone.
* 4 years later: "look, I can find one person who put some right coded language in a grant application, while ignoring that academia continues to be broadly intolerant of and inhospitable to conservative speech, ideas and people. I win." If that's your motte, you've already admitted the critique of universities is correct.
My claim isn’t that the political persuasions of academics will change. My claim is rather that they will just have a much stronger and harsher set of language police to deal with, requiring them to say even more things they don’t believe in to get funding (because at least some of them believed the old words they were putting in, while this time very few of them will and it will entirely be political virtue signaling).
The old set of language police, whatever their faults, didn't try to freeze all funding on their first week in office until they had been satisfied it wasn't going to anything they disagreed with.
1) The grant's call for applications often has a *requirement* that you do something to promote diversity or something.
2) I'm curious as to whether there is a correlation between grant size and wokeness. You've established that there are probably about 500 woke grants on the list, but do they actually account for $250M? If the woke garbage grants are for less money on average it could be substantially less than that (or more if they are more money on average).
3) I'm not sure that Cruz actually would consider this a failure. The point is to be PR. Saying that you found 3400 grants totaling $2B is much better PR than saying you found 500 totaling $250M, and how many people are actually going to check your work?
This situation sucks, but I'm less sympathetic to the scientists than you are. If you include some weasel words in your grant proposals to try to trick politicians and bureaucrats into thinking your research is woke when it actually isn't you can't really complain when politicians and bureaucrats think your research is woke when it isn't (even if hypothetically you did a poor job).
I wrote some grant proposals in a past life. It's very common to shoehorn in something that the grantor wants - not even necessarily related to anything "woke". It's just part of the nature of grant writing.
I also did this. Should note that it's often an admin lady or intern who adds these "weasel words" to increase their chances, not the scientists themselves.
See the comment above you - "The grant's call for applications often has a *requirement* that you do something to promote diversity or something."
I don't think scientists should be morally required to give up and go into a different field just because people demanded some weasel words about diversity before approving grants.
Yeah, I get it. I'm not blaming scientists for playing the game they were forced into, but the indignation about Ted Cruz misrepresenting studies as woke when they aren't seems pretty unreasonable. He isn't the one doing that, they are. Interpreted in that light, the tweet you cited seems particularly obnoxious:
This is literally his job now. Is it too much to expect him to be vaguely familiar with what the rules and practices were before a month ago? I just flat out don’t buy he can be this ignorant, and don’t accept it as a credible excuse.
Yup. Lots of johnny come latelies on this DEI topic who are prepared to say DEI is bad, but seemingly only now that they've decided its a vote loser for Dems. Until then, it was put up and shut up and let those who disagreed be tarred and feathered. I'm glad they're finally not afraid to speak up, but frankly, exactly why should their advice be taken particularly seriously now? When it mattered, they weren't prepared to speak the truth.
As much as I harp about the disinformation board being a major black mark on the Biden admin's intent, they did indeed wrap it all up because enough people complained and enough people blocked it in court.
Scientists are not generally selected for bravery, though, and most people are very bad at pushing back when it might hurt their wallet.
The longstanding Broader Impacts criterion, predating Biden, has been explained to you, why do you keep framing it as solely requiring 'weasel words about diversity'?
IIRC you are a psychiatrist by profession, yes? Have you ever applied for an NSF or NIH grant?
It's not about tricking politicians and bureaucrats. I have evaluated grants (not these specifically, but others), and there are rubrics that you follow based on the RFP (request for proposal). If the RFP has listed DEI stuff, the rubric will have a section on it. To improve your chance at success you should find someway, however tangential, to give yourself a shot at not getting a 0 on that section.
Side note: I understand why it's there, but I would love if the entire section on broader impacts went away. Let proposers focus on the science they actually know, and not waste time speculating on how it might have beneficial knock-on effects down the line.
>I would love if the entire section on broader impacts went away. Let proposers focus on the science they actually know, and not waste time speculating on how it might have beneficial knock-on effects down the line.
Agreed! My career was in the private sector, but we sometimes had loosely analogous weasel words sections, and, at best they wasted the time and effort to misconstrue what we were actually doing, and at worst they diluted the focus on the actual work.
> The project also aims to integrate research findings into undergraduate teaching and promote equitable outcomes for women in computer science through K-12 outreach program.
> a Hispanic-serving institution and the lead site for the center
> The planned studies will provide opportunities to train engineering and biomedical science students who work collaboratively through highly interdisciplinary (engineering, molecular biology, virology and pharmacology) research studies and will enhance ongoing education and outreach activities focused on attracting underrepresented minority groups into these areas of research.
Do you specifically want scientists to be considering the impact their words might have on politicians egos when writing their grants or not? If you don’t, then you shouldn’t punish them for including words that hurt politicians egos - you should just stop punishing them for saying words that hurt different politicians egos.
This is too 10000ft view. If you want to prevent scientists from "considering the impact their words might have on politicians egos" you have to change the rules that forced them to do that in the first place. The transition is what is causing the current issues, not the end state Ted Cruz is pursuing. I don't necessarily agree with the way he is going about it, but the things he is being blamed for seem a little illogical.
> The transition is what is causing the current issues
...because the change to the rules is bad and wrong. It should have been "you no longer have to include the magic words", not "you must never include the magic words". The point here is that the latter is just as bad as requiring the magic words was.
I disagree, I don't think making up a fake social benefit should be permitted in grant writing. A better transition would be "you can no longer include the magic words, but existing grants are grandfathered in", but the problem with that is that some grants are genuinely woke enough that is a legitimate reason to want to suspend them and the current issue stems from failure to classify the two cases.
Dumb question and don't want to make more work for you, but were there cost differences between the actually woke and the non-woke categories? Were 40% of the grants == to 40% of the costs for the woke?
I too am interested in this question. My baseline is that woke stuff took less than 40%, because real science is expensive and woke outreach is not real science and is cheap. But that could easily be wrong.
In my experience, PIs put little effort and very little of their funds into their Broader Impacts activities for NSF. Usually almost all the funds go to science (equipment and salaries). For example, a common Broader Impact is to do a science outreach project like a science fair; in this situation, the current lab PI and students will spend some of their time on the science fair, but it is a small percentage, and no one is hired just for the science fair. So unless the grant is specifically for a "woke" purpose, I'd say no more than 10%, sometimes as low as 0%.
They could have gone even further. Besides for refusing all grant applications with "woke" markers, they could even preferably approve grants to those with "anti-woke" sentences. Grantees would be gambling on the election outcome if they put in a sentence from either side. Much like "wrong side of history" stuff, revenge against people who gave lip service to your opponents is a tactic that can work.
Of course, in this case, two factors should override this:
1. People *hate* this stuff. The requirements were part of what caused left's downfall. Punishing performative submission to the other side isn't *as* bad, but it's still likely very unpopular.
2. Gaining a handful of culture war points *isn't actually as important* as the actual science being done. Grant proposals are a terrible place to use as a culture war battlefield. It would be better for the right to just give in on this. Some people would keep adding woke sentences just in case, but it would slowly drop in frequency. People would be grateful.
> Some people would keep adding woke sentences just in case,
That's precisely what this whole thing is meant to stop. Your proposal might be fine if you expect the current policies to prevail forever (or at least for many decades), but if your expected time with power is ~8 years, ruthlessly punishing anyone adding in those sentences HELPS everyone who doesn't want to have to: making everyone conform to your new directives stops the other guys from retaliating against those who did when the return, even if only by favoring those who didn't "just in case."
'Our research on cancer cures will advance the state of the art in the field to where it is more difficult for inferior minds to comprehend, thus discouraging women and minorities from entering STEM education.'
That would require Ted Cruz to act in good faith, which he never does.
The point of this list wasn't to provide a thoughtful review of NSF grant making. It's just a hyper-partisan attempt to score points. These guys do not care if what they are saying is true, false, exaggerated, whatever. They just want to make noise.
I agree with @Gabriel. I'm not an American, but I'm guessing Ted Cruz (or his team) is not *really* unaware that his list contains both woke and genuinely non-woke research proposals. It's more likely that he added all of them together to get a nice, sensationalist *OMG DEMS GAVE $2 BILLION TO THE WOKES!!* headline, the same way that moderate Democrats and Republicans are often vilified by Bernie/AOC supporters as stooges to The Billionaires and The Corporations.
The bigger issue with all this is the descent into populism on both sides of the aisle. I'm an Indian, and it has been India's lived experience that when politicians are allowed by voters to descend into populism and vitriolic identity politics, it is the the voters and regular citizens that increasingly become disempowered economically and politically.
Ultimately, both the Dems and the Republicans are using taxpayer money to behave like spoiled trust fund kids, and I appreciate your efforts to call them out on this.
He can also ask staffers to make the largest list they can plausibly justify, so that he can announce a big number when describing how much 'junk woke science' Biden was funding and he is destroying.
Which is the thing that helps his political career.
Except ISTM Ted Cruz has identified wokeness and Scott has mis-identified it.
Wokeness isn’t e.g. ’this proposal will benefit this minority group, e.g. because it will cure a disease which particularly affects one ethnic group.’ I, and I imagine Ted Cruz, would be in favour of that.
Wokeness is e.g. benefiting minority groups is the only way we value things and therefore even proposals that don’t substantially benefit minorities have to pretend to do so.
But these grants are full of all kinds of explanations of how their project will benefit all of the everything, not just minority groups. If wokeness is *ONLY* valuing things insofar as they benefit minorities, then we have construed wokeness narrowly enough that these grants don't really qualify.
Except, perhaps, the "study how university policy affects distinct sub-categories of black students," which I guess is 'woke' if the object of the game is to never think again about how university policy affects black people.
It's not just that scientists include things about how our work could help minorities in order to pass some Biden-era DEI filter. It's that discussing the Broader Impacts of the research you're proposing -- including how it's going to help minorities -- has been required by law of every grant since 1980. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Biden, except in the sense that Biden didn't push to change this law.
The Foundation shall apply a broader impacts review criterion to identify and demonstrate project support of the following goals:
(1) Increasing the economic competitiveness of the United States.
(2) Advancing of the health and welfare of the American public.
(3) Supporting the national defense of the United States.
(4) Enhancing partnerships between academia and industry in the United States.
(5) Developing an American STEM workforce that is globally competitive through improved pre-kindergarten through grade 12 STEM education and teacher development, and improved undergraduate STEM education and instruction.
(6) Improving public scientific literacy and engagement with science and technology in the United States.
(7) Expanding participation of women and individuals from underrepresented groups in STEM.
This. And the grants in the non-woke and sorta-woke categories that only had a sentence about STEM diversity or such were not including it as an aside. They would have had a page or so (out of 15) that explained in detail what they were planning to do in this area, as part of the congressionally-established STEM workforce diversity option for broader impacts.
In my experience as a proposal writer and reviewer, you can probably assume an average of 2% of the total award funds would be devoted to such activities, which would be easily separable from the rest of the research.
What is your view of whether that part of the law is sensible? My career was in the private sector and when something loosely like this kind of side project was imposed, it cut into the focus on the main task. Maybe a 100,000 person company can have side projects with people devoted full time to them in a sensible way, but my (vague) impression is that research teams are too small for that.
The purpose of the law is not to add side projects, it’s to make scientists justify how their research will benefit the public. The list above just gives ways scientists might justify that. It doesn’t always take the form of side projects, and in my experience both as grantee and reviewer, grants are much more likely to get funded if the Broader Impacts are well integrated into the science itself, rather than just being a side project.
The reason this became law at all was due to scientifically illiterate congresspeople glancing at a grant for two seconds and raising hell about those dang scientists studying what fruit flies are attracted to. They made scientists have to justify how what they are studying could benefit the public. The irony of this now being the locus of “woke” is hopefully obvious.
>in my experience both as grantee and reviewer, grants are much more likely to get funded if the Broader Impacts are well integrated into the science itself, rather than just being a side project.
That makes sense.
>The reason this became law at all was due to scientifically illiterate congresspeople glancing at a grant for two seconds and raising hell about those dang scientists studying what fruit flies are attracted to.
Yeah. I remember Proxmire doing this. One of his "awards" was for a study of Peruvian potatoes. I don't know much about botany, but even _I_ know that if you want to look for potentially useful genes for a domesticated species, looking at the strains and wild relatives in place where it was first domesticated is a good bet.
I'm somewhat uncomfortable that the "Broader Impacts" are getting analyzed and justified at the granularity of individual grants. This sounds like the sort of analysis that should be done at a coarser level (e.g. "advance biology of cancer" or "advance physics of superconductors") with the broad justification done at the coarser level and the analysis of individual grants done with a tight focus on the scientific merit (exceptions for projects which are _specifically_ liaison efforts).
I think that’s a reasonable idea, but it requires a world in which taxpayers and politicians trust scientists not to waste money and don’t make them justify each thing they want to do to non-scientists. It looks like we’re moving away that world rather than towards it.
Every scientist has always complained about the “broader impact” and “outreach” portions of grants. Funding or killing projects because of them will make scientists waste even more time on them.
"Every scientist" is not overburdened by thrse requirements and they are generally not a time sink. A large percentage of flagship research institutions have public outreach organizations that work to support broader impact requirements. Stated plainly, these are "plug and play" programs that interact with undergraduate, high school, or middle school students. Speaking first hand, this is how STEM professionals keep the next generation excited about being I STEM, and many actually like seeing the general public being excited about their work.
As Scott pointed out in the examples from the database, it's including a sentence at the end of the abstract or single page that is copied and pasted in each grant application.
This whole culture war on woke is such a waste of time and energy. What the he'll is neo-marxism anyways? It sounds like political word salad for the shallow minded.
Many Thanks! Yeah, it makes sense to have _separate_ outreach organizations. The skill set to advance a scientific field, and to explain what one is doing to others _in the field_ is different from the skill set to explain all the links back to the top level goals that the public cares about and understands.
Is it sensible to occasionally make a special effort to attract women and minorities to science and engineering? Sure, to the extent that it's a countermeasure to peer/teacher pressure in high school that says women can't do math.
Is it sensible to encourage scientists receiving federal funding to do things that advance broader societal goals that they are uniquely able to accomplish? Sure.
Would I rather be able to just spend taxpayer money on whatever I thought was most important? You bet!
As another commenter noted, it's not* going to be a significant diversion of effort unless the lead investigator wants it to be, in which case they're doing something they want to do anyway.
*The exception would be federal grant programs that require a significant effort as a condition of the program. I personally think federal grant managers often bake too many constraints into their funding programs. I understand why they do it: they want to help shape science in a way that will do the most good and meet the most urgent needs (and also so they can tell Congress "look at these great initiatives we've developed").
But I prefer minimal constraints, for the benefit of science in general. I think ten scientists proposing their own best idea and plan is better than ten scientists proposing their best idea for tackling a pre-specified class of problems in a pre-specified way.
>But I prefer minimal constraints, for the benefit of science in general. I think ten scientists proposing their own best idea and plan is better than ten scientists proposing their best idea for tackling a pre-specified class of problems in a pre-specified way.
Agreed.
> I personally think federal grant managers often bake too many constraints into their funding programs.
That is my impression as well. I am concerned that, even if just 2% of the funds for a scientific research project go towards, e.g. minority outreach, I'd expect it to chew up a considerably larger fraction of time than just the 2%. Context switching eats time. Maintaining records for very different sets of activities eats time.
I also wouldn't expect the skills needed to drive a specialized STEMM area forward to have much of a match with e.g. minority outreach.
Being a professor is ALL context switching. Doing research, teaching a class, answering emails, answering questions from students, attending a meeting, reviewing a paper, is par for the course FOR A SINGLE DAY. Minority outreach at worst replaces a distraction rather than adding one.
This sounds like what Scott said about his history homework; they were all supposed to put in a reflection on how they did the homework and what they had learned, and they all dutifully included how they had consulted various sources and learned about the complexity etc. etc. but in reality they just cribbed everything off Wikipedia.
>Expanding participation of women and individuals from underrepresented groups in STEM.
Notably, women *haven't* been underrepresented in STEM for a few decades now, depending how you cut the borders. Wildly overrepresented in everything biology-adjacent, underrepresented in math-adjacent.
The Broader Impacts get especially silly for pure math research. It would be within the NSF's rights to say "No, we will not fund math research with no known practical applications", but instead the status quo seems to be: yes you can get funded, but you must claim you are going to do K12/public/URM outreach at some point. Meanwhile, many math researchers are introverts who would really rather not do such a thing.
Of course, sometimes you can twist things. There's an old joke about a mathematician who submitted a grant proposal "Annihilating Radical Left Ideals", a topic in pure algebra that happens to sound like you're fighting communism.
Correct me if Im wrong, but this seems to require that grants aim at at least one of these ends, but not necessarily all of them. In the grant excerpts above, it seems that the scientists specifically chose to mouth the woke language, probably because they believed it was easiest or most effective. I think it's perfectly fair to incentive scientists to choose one or more of the other "broad goals" instead of the woke one.
Scott, you talk a lot about how policing the language police is important. Because losing words to them is the beginning of some sort of woke oppression. In that sense, while the non-woke studies should proceed, it might be useful to have them submit an appeal without the woke flair. That will discourage others from sprinkling woke nonsense in their abstracts, effectively liberating the scientific rhetoric from it.
Do you want to police language or not? It sounds like this is just replacing one language police “you must include one of the following words” with the other “you must not include any of the following words”. Both are equally bad. But canceling people for doing the wrong one is even worse than failing to get people started working.
You bring a good point. I do think the woke enforcement of rules operates differently. There aren't hard rules, but you get cancelled if you break them. That's part of the annoyance. One has to be constantly walking on eggshells and double thinking before communicating. Explicit forbiddance is not a better solution, but I'm not sure it's necessarily less harmful.
🤷🏿♂️ maybe it's just because I'm a silly lib, but my assumption with all this stuff (extending to DOGE and beyond) is that they're intentionally shooting from the hip and have no issue with demonizing/shutting down things that are either borderline woke or not woke at all. Maybe similarly, Elon is claiming "fraud" about all kinds of govt activity that he doesn't like, regardless of whether there's fraud or not (my understanding is that he hasn't uncovered any real fraud at all, but if I'm wrong I hope someone lets me know).
We don't know the import of what he has 'uncovered' because none of it is reported with context. Or, in many cases, evidence. You can bray about some cringey 'line items' in a USAID accounting but unless you have a sense of *all* the expenditures and amounts in a year of USAID operation, it's just cherry picking. And you can be sure Elon won't release that , just as he didn't put the supposedly damning internal Twitter texts showing Biden 'censorship' of social media during COVID ( a story that Taibbi, Weiss, Greenwald ran with breathlessly) in context of *all* the messaging between them, which would have diluted the nefariousness angle considerably. (Another example: during the Obama era the GOP went full berserk when it emerged that the understaffed IRS was using heuristics -- keywords , like Musk is using now on grants -- to try to identify tax exempt nonprofits that were engaging in political activity. A limited tranche seemed to show targetting of right-wing groups, but examining the full range of the operation showed that left-wing groups were being targetted as well)
I think the clear solution here is to make sure everybody explains in future grant proposals how butch their science is and how it promotes traditional values.
(Note for future readers - at the time this would have read as sarcasm.)
I don't think it's fair to just wave this away as "they were just playing the game by including woke shibboleths in their grant applications". I don't think it's good or should be acceptable for woke shibboleths to matter to a grant application, and any study funded by playing the game this way should absolutely be looked at. They got four years to benefit from this advantage over the alt-right fascist studies who forgot to include the one sentence about benefitting minorities, and now the pendulum swings the other way.
Here's the thing: the presence of this shibboleth says *nothing* about the politics of the grant applicants. Academics without tenure have to put up with this shit or leave academia. Those are the only two options. I doubt you consistently demand such purity tests in other domains.
No, they didn’t get four years of this. It’s been decades of gradually requiring more, starting at least with the Reagan administration requiring statements of broader impact. If the point is to end the language policing and cancel culture, you don’t do that by canceling people equally and oppositely - you do that by stopping the pendulum altogether and eliminating the broader impact statement.
This seems like the least surprising failure mode imaginable. I can't quite claim to have predicted this in advance, since reading the headline of this post is the first I'd heard of said database. But to anyone who has paying a smidgeon of attention to how conservatives use and interact with the word "woke," it would be incredibly surprising to see any other outcome.
I wish I could say I expect this to be the crucial update that pushes you towards some long-overdue skepticism towards using "woke" as a word and as a concept, but alas I doubt it will happen. There *are* genuinely bad things that get associate with the word, and you *are* reasonable for pushing back against those things, and as long as there's a convenient handle it will still be easy enough to ignore the misuses of the term (which in the event, is *most* of the uses, as you have seen).
But I hope you'll at least take this opportunity to update on your view of the present government. Yes, it would have been easy to avoid this, for most people. They aren't most people. The sort of people who run the mental algorithms you're running here, where you actually look at the content and think about the effects and make a real effort to get it right: those aren't the people working on these things. Trump is, in fact, going to quite a bit of effort to get rid of people like that. The notion that the current administration was ever, EVER going to take the time (yes, even a few hours) to try to *understand* the things they were aiming to destroy of was not that plausible to begin with: still holding it after the last month seems ludicrous in the extreme.
> try to *understand* the things they were aiming to destroy
Why bother trying to understand anything? "Destroy all the things, look through the smoking rubble, rebuild those bits that in retrospect turn out to have been loadbearing" is what people voted for.
I disagree. Wokeness is basically a real thing, it’s bad, it’s good that the administration wants to reduce it, but it’s bad that they have such a high false positive rate. The problem can thus be summarized pretty straightforwardly.
If progressives want to be effective against the current administration, they have to give up on wokeness and stop trying to find ways to salvage it. That’s the surest way to undercut the admin’s raison d’etre.
Do you have a coherent definition of "wokeness" that allows you to make this assertion so confidently? Specifically, one that encapsulates all of what "anti-woke" people complain about, while still being self-evidently bad? I'd love to see it if so, I've been looking for one.
In the past week, I have heard that believing in anthropogenic global warming is woke, wishing to send aid to foreigners is woke, having a black actor play Captain America is woke, and that the KC Chiefs are woke. How many of these things fall under your definition of wokeness?
I’ve seen almost every bad thing - or thing the speaker or writer dislikes - included under the umbrella of socialism or fascism. I don’t think this implies those don’t exist. Yes, in politics, once a term develops a strong negative or positive connotation its use tends to expand dramatically. This isn’t proof it never existence.
I’m a bit incredulous that anyone who follows American politics is sincere when they say they don’t have an idea what it means.
I'm not arguing that wokeness exists, but to be honest, when I hear someone use it, I often don't know what it's referring to. So when you say "give up on wokeness and stop finding ways to salvage it", would that include PEPFAR? For e.g. Richard Hanania it wouldn't, for many of the people in his comment section it would.
In the context of this discussion, I don’t think it’s that difficult to get an idea of what it means. Basically affirmative action in grants or grants for research that promotes this worldview.
I also don’t think the false positives in this case are even mostly reflective of ambiguity of terminology. Most of the miscategorized grants were categorized this way because grant applicants added a sentence or two to their grants to appeal to standards no longer applied by the new administration, but which were seen as necessary or at least improving one’s chances with the previous one. So for the most part even this isn’t some inevitable consequence of the ambiguity of ‘wokeness.’
Thanks. Is PEPFAR a sort of affirmative action in grants? Or would that only be if it were a grant specifically for trans women to give out AIDS medication in needy areas?
I think a pretty obvious counter is that both "socialism" and "fascism" are ideas that historically have had proponents engaged in defining them as ideologies *under those names* and trying to put those ideologies into practice. Meanwhile "wokism" and "wokeness" are labels that are applied *almost entirely* from the outside. There was a transitional period where parts of the left used "woke" as a MUCH more narrow descriptor with entirely positive connotations[1]. But once the right took it up, spread it widely and started applying it to everything, pretty much all non-ironic usage on the left STOPPED. On the left, the word exists almost entirely as a joke. You will, ironically, find far, FAR more people who sincerely claim "socialism" as a fair description of their politics than would ever claim "wokism."
"I’m a bit incredulous that anyone who follows American politics is sincere when they say they don’t have an idea what it means."
I guarantee you that peoples' confusion on this point is genuine. Though it's not a matter of "not having an idea." It's a matter of having "far, far too many ideas." I believe you when you say that YOU have an idea what you mean when you use the term[2]. The trouble is that I DON'T believe that *your* usage is in any way *the* usage: I don't think there *is* one central, consistent meaning that informs all the usages. Imagine for a second that you're talking to Bob, who is one of those people who throws "fascism" and "fascist" around willy-nilly. If you heard Bob call something "fascist" could you fairly claim that you have *no idea* what Bob means by the word? Of course not: you could certainly get an approximate sense. But hearing Bob call things "fascist" would neither let you generalize to figure out what non-Bob people mean when using the word, nor would it give you much information at all about historical fascism. Now imagine that there *was no historical fascism*, that the words "fascist" and "fascism" had arisen organically out of everyday language in the past decade or two, and had its usage change considerably within the past six or seven years. You would, again, get *some* information from hearing Bob use the word "fascism." But even with a hundred Bobs to compare and contrast, you might not be able to generalize that to THE definitive meaning of "fascism;" both because that's rather hard to do, and because in this context there need not BE a "definitive meaning."
[1]In particular, it was a positive quality, but not the root of any sort of political viewpoint: you could call someone or something "woke," which (by standard linguistic construction) I suppose might have given it a quality of "wokeness." But "wokism" would have sounded incoherent, in much the same way that we don't generalize "politeness" or "wariness" to "politism" or "waryism."
[2] Well, mostly. I think it's very possible that if you interrogated your own sense of the word sufficiently you might find some inconsistencies.
Sure. I would describe it as the belief that it’s morally justified and necessary to discriminate against people - and promote prejudicial ideas - on the basis of race and sex in order to correct for ostensible race or sex-based wrongs either in the present or past. I don’t think that quite subsumes all of ‘wokeness,’ (e.g. I’d add a tenet that, to combat racism/sexism, it’s necessary to make exceptions to other erstwhile core liberal principles beyond non-discrimination) but I think that’s the core of it.
Pick whatever term you want for it, I don’t really care, but to pretend like this isn’t a phenomenon, especially to anyone that was around in the early 2020s, is just gaslighting imo.
OK, first let me say thank you for giving an actual answer. That allows for much more productive discussion than the "shut up, you know what it means" that I often see elsewhere. Second, let me say thank you for doing your best to make the definition reasonably clear and concise: that also makes for more productive discussion.
That being said, I definitely see some possible issues with it as a working definition. The main one being that the word "discriminate" is going to produce a lot of headaches here. I guarantee you that most of the people vocally engaged in various sorts of anti-racism DON'T consider anything they're doing to be discriminating or promoting discrimination in any way. Which means that as-stated, "the *belief* that it's..." is mostly going to lack any real referents. Those beliefs are pretty rare. Even if you try to rescue it by saying "the belief that [certain behaviors] are morally justified and necessary because..." (where [certain behaviors] are things you consider discriminatory) you've definitely left any personal intent to discriminate behind, and made a question about what "counts" as discrimination. Which I think is a much thornier question than you realize.
In case you haven't noticed the pitfalls, I'll ask you a simple question. Those signs on the bus that say that the front seats should be preferentially given to people who are pregnant, disabled or have mobility issues: are those discrimination? If yes, why? If no, also why? I notice that *I* don't really have a good answer, and feel like I could pick apart any simple argument for either "yes" or "no" in a heartbeat. I mean, they're obviously giving some people preferential treatment. But they're also not doing it arbitrarily or capriciously and calling it "preferential" actually makes some pretty deep assumptions.
"Pick whatever term you want for it, I don’t really care, but to pretend like this isn’t a phenomenon, especially to anyone that was around in the early 2020s, is just gaslighting imo."
I'm not pretending anything. I'm aware that there's SOMETHING that has gotten many conservatives--and a decent number of non-conservatives--just absolutely hopping mad over the past decade and change. But attempts to interrogate what that "something" is have consistently produced more confusion than clarity. The details seem to shift a lot from one account to the next. I, too, often feel like I'm being gaslit here, but by people constantly insisting that it's totally clear and obvious what they mean when it absolutely is not. And I'm not alone in this: as far as I can tell THE dominant view of "wokeness" among young-ish, online, vaguely-leftist sorts is that the word as its used today is almost meaningless: it basically means "anything a conservative doesn't like." I'm not saying this with malice or even anger: I do find the phenomenon irritating sometimes, but more than that I find it quite curious.
I think discrimination is easy to define. E.g. if you're accounting for a person's race when deciding whether to hire them, you're engaging in racial discrimination. If you were to substitute 'white' or 'male' for 'black' or 'female', respectively, and you would call it discrimination, then it's discrimination. I'm skeptical that people who support such policies *really* don't intend to discriminate frankly. It's just that discrimination is seen as a dirty word and it's more strategic to redefine morally loaded words around their preferred exceptions than admit that their opinion is that in some cases a generally bad thing is actually good.
I didn't include disability or pregnancy in my definition so I'm not following the relevance. If you're leftish, then you probably agree with the idea that discrimination based on race and sex are bad, in general, no? When discussing discrimination against groups of people you strictly oppose discrimination against, you would probably find things less ambiguous, irrespective of the intent of the one doing the discrimination.
What I suspect may be going on here is that to most progressives, certain discriminatory policies or attitudes toward e.g. white people, males, Asians in some cases, follow logically from the same progressive principles that justify welfare or environmental policy or civil equality, so the idea that the former can or should be logically unbundled from the latter and singled out for objection seems odd or arbitrary. And since even unrelated political positions are strongly correlated, it's natural even if illogical to bundle unrelated positions together for proponents and opponents alike.
The obvious retort would be "perhaps you think it's easy to define because you've never been confronted with a situation where it wasn't." Or rather more bluntly "perhaps you think it's easy to define because you've never had to grapple with it up close and personal." I don't know you or know anything about you, so I'm NOT actually going to make either of those claims. But I will make the (still rather blunt) claim that you probably have no actually put much serious thought into the matter, and especially that you probably haven't read very widely on the topic. There is a wealth of complexity there that you (apparently) simply don't see. For example:
"I didn't include disability or pregnancy in my definition so I'm not following the relevance."
The relevance is that they play havoc with your nice, neat definition of discrimination. They play havoc with it in a way that ought be pretty easy to see, which makes them useful for testing one's intuition.
Let's take another example: hiring discrimination and pregnancy. Your definition: "if you take a person's pregnancy into account when deciding whether to hire them, you're engaging in discrimination." Let's work with that.
First we need to know what it means to NOT take it into account. If you hire completely blind, looking only at resumes, stripped of any information that could indicate correlates of pregnancy (such as age, gender or marital status)[1] is that a sufficient condition to avoid discrimination based on pregnancy? It should be, right? Hold on, but someone being pregnant isn't just a box they tick on a form (that you can just leave off), it has real, measurable impacts on somebody's job availability. What if you're hiring for extra, short-term programmers to hit a production deadline that's coming up in six months. Isn't it, well, rather important that the person you will be available full-time three, four and five months from now?
Of course, you can just put that in the job requirements. "Must be available full-time for the next six months with no vacation or leave." But then you ARE "taking a person's pregnancy into account," you're just doing it in a way that puts the onus on them to self-select out of your applicant pool, rather than removing them yourself. And of course, it's not the pregnancy itself, merely an unavoidable effect of the pregnancy. But the result is the same: this group of people is significantly less able to get hired at your job.
I'm not even claiming the above paragraph is a bad or unreasonable way to handle it: reality imposes constraints and you DO have to work around them. But I will be *very* disappointed if you try to weasel out of the obvious conclusion by claiming that's not "really" discrimination. Quite clearly it is, by your own definition. You had to take a certain factor (ability to work) into account when hiring somebody. That made certain people (people in the middle of a pregnancy) effectively ineligible to be hired.
I could type more. I could probably fill a dozen pages with examples of situations where "don't take X into account when hiring somebody" is either functionally impossible or would result in a broken hiring process, for almost any X you can imagine. But I'd rather see how you respond to what I've already written and if it results in any clarifications or updates to your thinking.
" I'm skeptical that people who support such policies *really* don't intend to discriminate frankly."
I'm skeptical that you have any idea how people who you consider "woke" actually think. I think the entire thread about your writing about such people betrays a very superficial understanding of how *they* think and talk about such issues. I'm actually quite strongly reminded of how I see people on the left talk about "tech bros" sometimes: the same very un-nuanced, very homogenized broad strokes that makes a very simplistic attempt to model a very heterogeneous (and generally poorly defined) group. It shows very little awareness of what discourse *within* these groups actually looks like, or how complex some of the ideas under discussion *actually are.*
In the same way people complained about "political correctness gone mad" 20 years ago, the way the term is often used subsumes a lot more beyond this such as environmental issues.
While it would definitely be pretty easy to sort through these, perhaps there are some procedural reasons to just cut everything that even barely mentions something woke.
Even an executive order can’t do things like violate equal protection, and I imagine there would be some pretty angry lawsuits if there was some arbitrary cutoff of wokeness, that probably placed certain demographics in higher promotions in the woke camp compared to those who were technically woke, but still got away with it.
Maybe cutting it all makes the process simple, easy, and not requiring any arbitrary human judgement.
As somebody who has never looked at grant text before, I had the exact option response to this. The list is true! Almost every grant, if taken literally, is woke and promises to implement DEI in some form.
I don't think think saying "they lied to get the grant" is that much of a consolation either.
Why would someone putting in a couple sentences say they care about students of color be a reason to think their cancer research isn’t worth funding? I thought this administration was claiming that racist tweets are no reason to cancel someone, so why should including a racist sentence in a grant application be a reason to cancel them?
None of the sentences are "we care." They are "we care an outsized amount and promise to give special treatment".
It's not remotely "cancellation" or equivalent if you care to actually think about it for one second. When I first read the uproar I assumed it was (e.g. Marxist professors getting funding for XYZ). But instead no, it's actually straight up government-funded DEI promises (however insincere they may be).
Everything you say is true, but to me it’s even worse: by Ted Cruz’s own lights, scientists forced to include DEI boilerplate in order to get grants ought to be considered *victims* of the woke regime. Why on earth would you re-victimize the victims? Rather than demonstrating the superiority of your new regime by showing how the victims will now be treated so much better?
If Trump required grant-applicants to explain how their research helped whites, would you call scientists who applied for those grants victims? When the next administration cancelled those grants would you defend the scientists? I doubt it.
I doubt it because you already understand that if scientists mouthed the words “my research is good because it especially helps whites” it would dignify and reinforce the idea that special favor for whites is good, and you find that idea repugnant. Indeed, you probably would consider those scientists at best cowards and at worst evil.
The reason people think scientists who mouthed woke phrases are victims is because either (1) for class or ideological reasons they see wokeness as generally reasonable or (2) they instinctively believe that the role of left-liberals is to exercise power while the role of conservatives is to merely check power and therefore it is reasonable for “neutrals” to follow left-liberal trends.
Those in category (1) are philosophically and morally wrong.
Those in category (2) need to be taught a lesson. I want our system’s functionaries – the lawyers, teachers, government workers, corporate VPs, scientists – to feel in their bones that the political pendulum does not swing from the left to the middle, but rather from the left to the right. That if you mouth left-liberal orthodoxies under one administration, you’ll lose your funding under the next.
In particular, I want scientists to be so fearful, angry, and annoyed by this phenomenon that they lobby Congress to remove any requirement that they mouth woke phrases; that they lobby the next Democratic administration not to offer grants that require woke phrases. And if even their lobbying efforts fail, I want them to think extra-hard before applying for grants that require woke pretensions and I want them to put considerable emotional effort into toning down any woke language they do mouth.
I realize this will cause individual pain for functionaries who have (quite reasonably!) assumed that mouthing woke ideology is safe. But I care more about the social good of defeating those ideas than their individual pain.
Yes, you're right. I do find the idea of discrimination meant to rectify past monstrous injustices, infinitely more intellectually and morally defensible than the idea of discrimination meant to entrench the injustices even further ... even if the former ALSO turns out to create more problems than it solves and probably, usually be a bad idea.
"Rectifying past injustices" was the justification for affirmative action in the 70s. As you already know, the current justification is "diversity" (fewer whites and men makes us stronger) and "systemic racism" (faith that massive, but invisible racism explains disparities in group outcomes).
To the extent any scientist agrees with you 60 years after civil rights, they are not victims, but rather purposefully blind or more likely masking some other ideology.
To the extent any scientist merely mouthed woke words, they are not victims, but cowards who apparently must be taught by fear to understand that the Right can also wield power.
To a first approximation, my party is whichever party talks to the scientists doing productive science in a less menacing tone. That party obviously isn’t yours.
But not really, right? Because you've already said that you would support "menacing" scientists who sought grants expressly to help white people and men.
You're using "science" to shield your more basic opinion that discriminating against whites and men is fine, but discriminating against "underrepresented minorities" and women is wrong.
There’s the thing: you could *imagine* woke bureaucrats telling me that I need to be defunded, effectively chased out of science, to punish me for my sins as a white male. But they never did. A few crazies on the Internet said that, but the bureaucrats were happy to fund my quantum computing research if I said “I like diversity and want to support a diverse group of students” (wildly controversial, I know) — and then went on recruit the best students of whatever background I could find. *You*, and those in the Trump administration who think like you, are the first people who’ve ever credibly threatened to defund me for failing to toe their political line.
> the idea of discrimination meant to rectify past monstrous injustices
Taken at face value, this is a statement in support of the new regime ruthlessly punishing everyone who sided with the old "woke" one, in order to rectify the injustices it inflicted on its enemies now with the power to get payback.
But of course, you don't mean that. There is no principle here beyond the friend–enemy distinction: if it benefits your side, it's a morally defensible correction, and if it benefits the enemy at your expense, it's a monstrous injustice.
"In particular, I want scientists to be so fearful, angry, and annoyed..."
In this, at least, you seem perfectly in-line with the current administration. A lot of us instead want the scientists to be...wait for it...DOING SCIENCE. That's the entire purpose of science funding, to have scientists doing science, because you value science as a source of knowledge.
When somebody adds some silly political cruft to the grant-application processes, they are moving things in the wrong direction[1] in a real but fairly minor way. Maybe it's for noble reasons, maybe it's for bad ones, but either way they should stop. But when you say "scientists need to be crushed until the FALL IN LINE (with my particular politics)" you're not even *pretending* to make a noble mistake, or a reasonable request or to value science at all. You're simply wanting to exert power over people for the sake of exerting power.
[1] Though notice that the requirement these stem form has seemingly been there for decades and is only now getting this sort of response.
I'll ask the same question to you that I asked above: if the scientists in question had written "my research will especially help whites and men" in order to satisfy some "silly political cruft," would you shrug and call it minor?
Emphatically, yes. It would be minor. Again, whoever added the "silly political cruft" requirement to the process was probably doing bad work and reversing that work seems reasonable. But why on Earth would I get mad at scientists trying to get grants for following the process laid out for them to get grants? Why on Earth would I want the scientists to become "fearful, angry and annoyed" at following the requirements *other people* set on their jobs? Why on Earth would I want them to spend untold time and effort on "lobbying congress" instead of doing science?
Science funding is political because all funding is political, that's unavoidable. But actively trying to make the process *more* about politics--especially in deliberately divisive ways--and *less* about science is B-A-D.
As a side note, when we're talking about science, I don't think there are *nearly* as many people as you imagine who consider research that "especially helps whites" or "especially helps men" to be an inherently bad thing. I certainly don't. Doubtless there are some because you for any stupid position you can imagine, somebody holds it. But I doubt you've actually thought through what that looks like.
What would "science that especially helps whites" look like? Skin cancer research? R&D on better sunblock? Who exactly is protesting these things? Certainly not me.
Meanwhile "science that especially helps men," is a field well enough established that it has a name, journals, clinics, you name it:
Is anyone protesting the latest in andrology research? Probably somebody, but certainly not me. They're not getting much press if they are.
It seems like you may be confusing science with politics. The reason that *political* initiatives focused specifically on "helping white men" get such push back is because for a very large chunk of U.S. history that's what nearly ALL politics was about. The people who push back against initiatives like that now largely[1] do so because they think the disparities that were *deliberately* being created through most of U.S. history still have significant lingering effects today. Not, in general, because of some hatred toward white people and/or men (though again, see footnote [1]). It's reasonable to disagree with them on that set of empirical observations about the world, but if you think that their belief system regards "things that improve the lives of white men" as *inherently* bad, you simply do not understand that bit of reality very well.
"the political pendulum does not swing from the left to the middle, but rather from the left to the right."
Wow, you can't make this stuff up. When has the political pendulum in the U.S. EVER swung "from left to middle?" Look at the past 25 years: how many under Republican presidents? How many under Democrats? What about the makeup of congress over that time? What about the Supreme court? What about major long-term policy items, like the military budget, the distribution of the tax burden, the aggregated size of well-fare programs? Perhaps I hallucinated the past quarter-century, but I seem to remember the right getting its way *quite often* during that time period.
I suspect that your issue has far less to do with politics and more to do with culture. The culture of large parts of the U.S. HAS shifted over the decades in ways that (I assume) you strongly dislike. But culture doesn't flow from the government to the people. The vast, vast, VAST majority of culture comes from what people do on their own, outside the spaces where government happens.
I'd wager that you'd find the cultural makeup of most scientific fields not to your liking. But the reasons for that have (as far as I can tell, having spent quite a lot of my life in the relevant spaces) very little to do with any government policy, and everything to do with who values academics and how they relate to others[1]. I absolutely guarantee you that having a conservative government deliberately try to make working scientists "fearful, angry and annoyed" is going to do exactly NOTHING to shift the cultural makeup of the sciences in the direction you want. Quite the opposite.
[1] Though I'd venture a guess that having one of the two major political parties categorically reject the legitimate conclusions of a major area of science for literal decades has done conservatives no favors there. But note despite the connection to politics, the underlying mechanism is still cultural rather than legal.
If this theory is correct, the more pressing question is what scientists should do about the current administration’s new dogmas, since the next progressive administration will punish them for adhering to conservative dogmas. So if a scientist mouths the anti-woke phrase “gulf of America” or “LGB” under this administration, they’ll lose their funding under the next. What is a scientist to do?
It’s true that one way out of this is to lobby congress to not need to mouth any phrases, but that includes both the hypothetical woke phrases of the next administration and the actual free-speech stifling that trump is engaging in. For some reason you only focus on the woke side.
I don't know enough about the US grant process to say whether Cruz has the right approach, but I'd bet that a supermajority of grantees have been lifelong Dem voters. Hard to call them victims of the woke regime when they've actively supported it
So anything Democrat is "woke" now? Asking because I keep trying to nail down the term to a coherent meaning, with little success.
FWIW I'd wager that a clear majority of the grantees NOT on Cruz's list are also Dem voters. My overall impression is that liberal and left cultural spaces almost always hold academic careers in high regard, while many conservative cultural spaces disdain them, with predictable results for the makeup of various fields.
That question doesn't follow. Not all Dem policies are woke, but all woke policies are Dem. If you vote for the Dems, you're voting for woke policies as well as others. That's the nature of big tent parties
And no, you're not asking because you're trying to nail down the term; you're asking as a rhetorical tool to try to score points on an online comments section. I'm not playing that overdone word game. You know what woke means, I know what woke means, and the host of this blog knows what woke means
>FWIW I'd wager that a clear majority of the grantees NOT on Cruz's list are also Dem voters. My overall impression is that liberal and left cultural spaces almost always hold academic careers in high regard, while many conservative cultural spaces disdain them, with predictable results for the makeup of various fields.
There's good reason to believe you have the causation backwards. Academia's leftward drift began long before the polarization in public attitudes towards it
"You know what woke means, I know what woke means, and the host of this blog knows what woke means"
NO I DAMN WELL DON'T. I'll thank you kindly to not tell me what I do and don't know. Apparently you *don't* know that's rude and dishonest, but you certainly should.
Everybody who's strongly against "woke" and is ABSOLUTELY SURE that it has a clear and coherent meaning and that anybody who claims otherwise is lying. And when I start to ask questions--to the extent that people are willing to answer at all--y'alls meaning are ALL DIFFERENT.
I've got a pretty good memory. I could list a bunch of things that woke means *to different people.* There would be some agreements among the lists, and also quite a lot of disagreements.
The closest thing to a *coherent* hypothesis I have for what people mean by the word is that they use pejoratively it to indicate Blue Tribe Cultural Signifiers. But since everyone has a different sense of what's bad, and a different sense of what, exactly is a Blue Tribe Cultural Signifier, that leads to a semantic mess of usage.
Scott (et al.!), there's another problem. Years ago, I was asked to review a Canadian grant proposal - it was delightful with exactly the right people, save one. She was not in the field and not very good in her own. All 3 reviewers voted to reject but asked to accept it if they ditched the weak link. Apparently, some (all?) agencies could not approve a grant unless it had at least 1 female - not written down, btw.
Another issue is some agencies do not vet the science part and accept things like "my lived experience overrides your hard data." If you can weed out the crap methodology, wouldn't that help?
A possible positive? Some agencies here and abroad demand that grant-seekers explicitly share their expectations of the impact on practice and policy which (to me anyway) is a good thing, if done right. (One thing I'm seeing in grants and especially startup pitches is mentioning which SDG(s) this project will advance. I haven't seen anyone get pissy over that).
Not trying to be difficult, and I'm sure there's lots of context I don't get, but I cannot comprehend how a situation in which a grant was worth accepting *if one person was kicked off* could exist. Is the idea that she is so bad that she will exercise a kind of anti-expertise? That seems like a strong claim.
Part of our remit was to assess the ability of the team to do the work. There can't be a weak link. She was going to get paid a lot of money and clearly would not contribute, so the funder could just cut that chunk of salary (and travel support and clerical support) but that opens the door to backlash. We liked the project but in a hypercompetitive setting., applicants' first job is to not get culled on the first round by the reviewers. Having a weaker team is not a good thing :)
The requirement that every grant has a woman on it is a bit of an odd overreach because in a heavily gender-skewed field, and with a small team, gives very little evidence of ill will, and even a positive attempt at inclusion can come up short.
Additionally claims [0] made that the number of Woke/DEI grants increased from 2021 to 2022 (by implausible margins, 0%->16%) were caused by the full grant text not being available on the web in 2021 and then available in 2022...[1]. A basic sanity check could find these sorts of things...
I am a scientist who has received funding from NSF, among other agencies.
I agree very strongly with this post. Thankfully my grants didn't make this particular list, but under the old system it was very much encouraged to talk up any chances that you might help out minorities etc. Most scientists do think it would be good to help minorities and try to do so when the opportunity presents itself, but it's not our main job and most people just added some boilerplate to make the proposals look good.
I am in the 'business' of selling scientific research to the government. The government said they wanted me to emphasize anything I might do to help minorities, and so I did that. Now they don't want me to, so okay I won't. I mostly want to do science. I am good at it and it is my contribution to "making America great".
The comments saying "well just don't fund them this time so they'll stop doing that" are depressing for two reasons. First, it seems egregiously unfair to set out some rules, people follow those rules, then you change the rules and accuse the people who followed them of bad behavior. You're the one who changed the rules! Second, these comments assume that we have other resources - we do not. If my funding runs out, then I'm unemployed and it's the end of my career as a scientist. I think people are imagining scientists as very well off people, but it's actually a fairly precarious insecure position and doesn't pay especially well. People mostly do it because they enjoy the intellectual challenge of it and because it is a rewarding to use ones talents to contribute to the store of human knowledge and is a benefit to society.
The new wisdom that it’s self evidently bad to want to help minorities or women seems a lot worse than some „woke“ boilerplate. What happened to „free speech“? The problem with woke was that it was causing a lot of hypocrisy and people resented having to be performative. But most Americans actually agree with the basic premise that it’s good to help people who were dealt a shitty hand at birth.
My guess is that the average black child born today is at most a moderately less privileged position than the comparable white child. The average girl born today probably has a better position than the average boy.
Didn't JD Vance say that the only relevant group to compare to is other Americans? Our duty is to other Americans not to people in other countries, so, to be consistent, those other people should be excluded from these comparisons.
I read this whole thing waiting for you to get to your defense of why the U.S. is a matriarchy only to reach the last paragraph, where you called your headline "provocative" and said you really wished that "matriarchy" and "patriarchy" were used less.
Do you have those numbers? Black people trying to “pass” as white are pretty common, but I’m only aware of one white person who has ever claimed to be black.
Whose credulity? Maybe in daily life there isn't much difference for some people, but when it comes to things such as the likelihood of being pulled over by a cop, the likelihood of being arrested, injured or killed as a result of that traffic stop I'd call that a bad hand. There are still persistent wage gaps of -87% and -84% respectively. The historical odds of serving as president are 2 in 67 (if i counted the member of presidential terms correctly) for black people and 0 in 67 for women. You and i might disagree about what constitutes "moderately".
Comparing groups of Americans to other groups of Americans yields some differences sure, but I would not generally describe them as being dealt a bad hand by life.
That title has to be reserved for people born in exceptionally bad circumstances, like the huge percentage of people born in extreme poverty across the world.
Do you also oppose your local soup kitchen on the grounds that it's helping hungry but well-off Americans rather than even more impoverished people in other countries? This seems like an isolated demand for rigor.
I'm not that extreme, but a part of me does feel like those are wastes of time all things considered. It's not really an isolated demand for rigor because all charities are not equal and some are more effective than others.
For women, they are advantaged in that they face less violence, less punishment for the same crimes, have easier admissions into schools, preference in hiring, have favorable divorce laws, and don’t have to work as much for the same consumption level.
How has the Trump admin abandoned Article 1?
And yes, the NSF is just a drop, but while no single drop believes its to blame for the flood. they're all part of it. It's my understanding that DOGE is reviewing all government spending over the next two years. A lot of drops eventually add up. And you've got to expect everyone will say "No, not THIS drop!" So some tough scrutiny will need to be applied, unless you think we don't need to worry about government spending at all.
Spending say £1 million to avoid £800 million in wastage is obviously tremendously efficient. The size of the savings is irrelevant to its efficiency - spending £0.01 to avoid £1000 dollars wasted is even more efficient.
But they didn't spend any money to remove waste, fraud, and abuse connected to PPP. 800B in loans were completely forgiven, and somewhere between 200B and 500B of those forgiven loans were fraudulent. But DOGE didn't touch them because to do so would embarrass Trump, that waste was his fuckup.
Histrionics about histrionics. Peak.
Bingo. Some of these people (including Scott) have had bad experiences with someone trying to cancel them for not being woke enough. It's understandable that this has made them hate wokeness. What's not understandable is if they start to think that fighting wokeness is more important than actually helping minorities, women, etc. Being indifferent to more trans kids committing suicide because "at least the government won't be woke anymore" is not a morally justifiable position.
That gets terribly conflationary if you generalize it. Scott has written about how misleading it can be to generalize that kind of observation that way before: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/
Partly, I don't mean that you can't generalize in any direction ever, but that if you use the common pattern you did above of picking out “the people who are complaining are still popular” then that doesn't imply what you might think, for reasons described in the article I linked, including that the people who would otherwise complain but can't afford to (or are afraid that they might not be able to afford to) tend to be invisible.
Partly, also, it's genuinely hard to figure out what's going on in fog of war conditions, for similar reasons, so talking about broad social movements in conflict *is* fraught in general, and if you want to be accurate I think you usually wind up having to do it very hesitantly, even though confident sweeping statements get more emotionally and socially incentivized by default.
Partly, I don't think “they clearly failed to cancel Scott” is a great description of the situation anyway. “He was able to handle a major hit piece by merely taking on a bunch of unexpected upheaval that he was ultimately able to make hay out of” doesn't sound quite as good, does it?
Your object-level point I'm not actually sure about. My current guess is that the current institutional anti-woke backlash is substantially worse than what it claims to be fighting, but that “very little real evidence of harm from wokeness” is way too glib: diffuse harms along the lines of “being trapped sociopsychologically from multiple angles” can be very bad in total when multiplied across time and people even if they're not *acutely* bad, and a lot of claims that wokeness isn't that harmful (I'm not sure about yours in particular) lean on something like “a justified expectation of emotional abuse from unpredictable but widespread sources doesn't aggregate into substantial harm”, which feels pretty wrong to me—compare how much of the harm resulting from e.g. anti-queer sentiment is due a cloud of fears following from stigmatization and bullying. (The classically woke answer to this type of complaint, by the way, is “well, that's not bad because they probably deserved it”.)
The parent comment you're replying to got deleted, so it's really hard for me to tell whether you're sincerely complaining about the pervasive threat of institutional wokeness/progressive cancel culture, or about the pervasive threat of transphobia/racism/sexism/homophobia. The sentiment is remarkably resonant.
It is morally justifiable if you think transgenderism is morally wrong.
Must be nice to not have to fear restribution for being honest. Enjoy it while it lasts.
That someone like you would call his workplace to say "hey you hired an anti-trans bigot" is my guess
Let me go one better: it's morally justifiable if you think that transgender ideology is what is causing the kids to commit suicide.
Okay, we don't need to go that far. Point is, society doesn't need to tolerate the existence of people who need to sin to survive.
If you need it to survive it shouldnt be a sin
...It doesn't really matter what 𝘸𝘦 want, does it? Only the victors have the right to be the arbiters of morality.
Well, please show me where your religious writings state that killing millions of innocent people is not a sin and that trying to live life in harmony with the soul god has given them is a sin.
"Sin" isn't necessarily a religious term, it just refers to anything that transgresses moral law. And a majority believes that changing gender is morally wrong, so... go ask them. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx
You know what I'd like? Hard figures on that claim floating around online about "trans kids suicides!" because so far as I can see, it's all based on one Nordic (or maybe Dutch, I can't even remember where it comes from) study that included "suicidal feelings".
I've had suicidal feelings but I haven't killed myself. But that study seems to be responsible for all the "40% of trans kids kill themselves! Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?" scaremongering used to stampede anxious parents into "you gotta put your kid on the pathway RIGHT NOW or else they'll end up DEAD and it will be ALL YOUR FAULT" when sometimes it's a case of 'anxiety around puberty, autism, co-morbid mental problems' but not really 'yep 100% trans for sure and lasting'.
Demanding more rigorous research on trans suicide while celebrating the government defunding research on trans suicide is really the chef’s kiss moment of anti-woke warriorism
There are many, many studies. Have at it: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=trans+suicide+statistics&oq=trans+suicide
So pulling the first result out, I see:
"Nearly 14% of adolescents reported a previous suicide attempt; disparities by gender identity in suicide attempts were found. Female to male adolescents reported the highest rate of attempted suicide (50.8%), followed by adolescents who identified as not exclusively male or female (41.8%), male to female adolescents (29.9%), questioning adolescents (27.9%), female adolescents (17.6%), and male adolescents (9.8%). Identifying as nonheterosexual exacerbated the risk for all adolescents except for those who did not exclusively identify as male or female (ie, nonbinary). For transgender adolescents, no other sociodemographic characteristic was associated with suicide attempts."
Depending on whether you're FtM or MtF, your risk of attempted suicide might be 50% or 30%. I suppose that comes to an average of 40%.
However, I would like to note this is a survey of the adolescents who were able to fill out the survey, which means they did not succeed in killing themselves. So the real rate of "trans kids will die" still remains unknown.
"This is a social contagion, and you're destorying innocent children's lives."
Or it's something that's been part of the human experience forever, and YOU are destroying innocent children's lives.
This is a bad argument. It's a lazy argument. It assumes HUGE amounts of stuff not in evidence, and then having so assumed them fails at basic reasoning about the implications.
If being trans *were* a social contagion, it would by no means follow that people supporting trans rights were destroying *anyone's* life. I've known many healthy, happy trans people living rich, full lives. I've seen no evidence that they suffered in any particular way *from being trans.* On the flip side, I've seen quite a lot of evidence of trans people often DO suffer from bigots trying to make them miserable (because they're trans). Given that many, many decades of bigotry--most of it institutionalized--have plainly *failed* to stop people from realizing they're trans, it seems pretty hard to claim that if you just oppress trans people *a little harder* the whole thing will go away there will be less overall suffering.
Scott has written a number of relevant things on the topic, most notably here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
But also to the broader question of why having such a belief isn't adequate justification for trying to hurt people:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
But in case two moderate-length blog posts are more work than you care to put into double-checking your views on this topic (despite thinking those views justify deliberately hurting people), I'll be nice and give you a couple relevant quotes:
"Likewise, the primary thing in psychiatry is to help the patient, whatever the means. Someone can concern-troll that the hair dryer technique leaves something to be desired in that it might have prevented the patient from seeking a more thorough cure that would prevent her from having to bring the hair dryer with her. But compared to the alternative of “nothing else works” it seems clearly superior.
"And that’s the position from which I think a psychiatrist should approach gender dysphoria, too.
Imagine if we could give depressed people a much higher quality of life merely by giving them cheap natural hormones. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in the world who wouldn’t celebrate that as one of the biggest mental health advances in a generation. Imagine if we could ameliorate schizophrenia with one safe simple surgery, just snip snip you’re not schizophrenic anymore. Pretty sure that would win all of the Nobel prizes. Imagine that we could make a serious dent in bipolar disorder just by calling people different pronouns. I’m pretty sure the entire mental health field would join together in bludgeoning anybody who refused to do that. We would bludgeon them over the head with big books about the side effects of lithium.
Really, are you sure you want your opposition to accepting transgender people to be “I think it’s a mental disorder”?"
and
"When I was young and stupid, I used to believe that transgender was really, really dumb. That they were looking for attention or making it up or something along those lines.
Luckily, since I was a classical liberal, my reaction to this mistake was – to not bother them, and to get very very angry at people who did bother them. I got upset with people trying to fire Phil Robertson for being homophobic even though homophobia is stupid. You better bet I also got upset with people trying to fire transgender people back when I thought transgender was stupid.
And then I grew older and wiser and learned – hey, transgender isn’t stupid at all, they have very important reasons for what they do and go through and I was atrociously wrong. And I said a mea culpa.
But it could have been worse. I didn’t like transgender people, and so I left them alone while still standing up for their rights. My epistemic structure failed gracefully. For anyone who’s not overconfident, and so who expects massive epistemic failure on a variety of important issues all the time, graceful failure modes are a really important feature for an epistemic structure to have."
Banned for high-temperature, low value comment which makes strong assertions without defending them and seems kind of dismissive of the whole suicidality angle. I just don't expect this commenter staying here to be productive.
I do in fact believe that fighting wokeness is more important than actually helping minorities, women, etc, and not because I think the latter is unimportant. Wokeness is an existential threat to the fundamental values of Western civilization, particularly freedom of speech and equality under the law. I do not agree that helping minorities or women is more important than helping white men, and even if I did, increasing numbers of those minorities and women are realizing that left-wing ideology poses a threat to their values and their livelihoods too--which is why they shifted toward Trump en masse in the last US presidential election.
"Wokeness is an existential threat to the fundamental values of Western civilization, particularly freedom of speech and equality under the law. "
It never ceases to amaze me how effective political movements can be at hyping anything at all they don't like into an "existential threat." Even when (or *especially when*) they seem to have trouble even robustly identifying that thing.
I am not part of any political movement. Although I do donate to charities combating poverty, and until recently did go to pride parades and anti-Trump marches (while being just as anti-woke), so you can associate me with political movements as you like.
I didn't say you were part of a political movement. But the hyping-up of "wokeness as an existential threat" was CERTAINLY associated with a political movement. You don't need to be part of it to absorb its memes.
What, precisely, is "wokeness," that makes it an existential threat? When I think of existential threats, I usually think of "a giant comet coming to destroy the Earth's biosphere" or "Skynet with killbot factories and nuclear launch codes at its disposal" Even stuff like global warming or giant plagues are only "existential" to specific subgroups, and specific regions, not entire civilizations.
Being entirely conquered by hostile foreigners willing to let literally millions starve because of their weird economics concepts and general indifference did not turn out to be an "existential" threat to Indian civilization; India is still there.
I have a hard time imagining a plausible definition of "wokeness" that both makes "wokeness" into something which could credibly threaten the existence of "Western civilization" and which has a reasonably plausible path to doing so.
I said it was an existential threat to the fundamental values of Western civilization, not to Western civilization itself. It's true that if America is ruled by the political equivalent of religious fundamentalists stamping their boot on the face of human freedom for all time, America would not disappear as a civilization, much less the rest of the West. Such a world is not one we should look forward to. It is one we should be willing to endure enormous sacrifices to avoid.
> banning books that helps kids understand that it’s ok to be gay or that not all families look the same
...well, yes, because it turns out that lots of people actually believe it's not ok to be gay or look different, and those people vote. This is working exactly as designed.
> when they can plainly see the real damage
What you see as damage, the other side sees as healing.
Mate, that guy is agreeing with you.
...I mean, I'm venting more than a little bit here, so it's a fair cop to some extent :)
“Banning books” —you mean, of course, “not stocking certain books in publicly funded libraries.” Such tiresome bullshit.
Uh? No, it’s not. When the Soviet Union, for example, “banned a book,” it didn’t just remove it from state libraries. It made it a crime to purchase/publish the book. Any understanding that “banning books” in fact means “not stocking books in publicly funded libraries” is solely the result of left-wing propagandizing which has twisted the common meaning of the term to generate hysteria over a totally unproblematic policy.
“Pressuring publishers” isn’t a “book ban”. If I say, “this book is bad and harmful, people shouldn’t buy it and the publisher should stop publishing it” am I “banning” the book? It’s absurd on its face.
You can be opposed to the library policy! I just wish you and others on your team would stop using deceptive language to oppose it.
Uh huh. And if you look at the books at that, say, Amazon, the largest bookseller in the world, removed from their catalog, what kind are they?
And it's a really stupid definition of "book banning" intended to make librarians feel good about themselves for making big displays publicizing books that somebody criticized once at a schoolboard meeting.
"Cruelly denying the gender self-determination of our fellow citizens and denying them access to care that their families and doctors have carefully decided upon."
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/3190997/meet-worlds-youngest-transgender-model-noella-mcmaher-10
Yeah, I'm totally convinced this ten year old (at the time) kid independently decided they wanted to be a runway model and there was no pressure from a Stage Mom at all. They absolutely knew their innate gender and sexuality at the age of three.
The modelling industry has enough problems for adults, I think shoving a kid into it counts as child abuse. But hey, I'm a knuckle-dragging bigot, so what do I know?
But it's all done under the one umbrella. "You must accept that John is now Susan" for a 40 year old man who has come out as a trans woman somehow means that Munchausen by Proxy parents can mould their two year old into "my trans kid! here's my Venmo, Ko-fi, Kickstarter, etc. accounts for your contributions to support us in our struggle!" and nobody is permitted to criticise this. Because then we get the litany of "cruelly deadnaming, refusing to accept identity, outlaw trans care" and the rest of it.
If you're over 18 and you want to cut bits off yourself over mental illness, okay I can't stop you. If it's a child and there's some kind of parental power struggle going on (e.g. custody battles) or they're pushing the kid into being a performing monkey (e.g. Jazz Jennings) then hell yeah I'm a cruel bigot as regards "maybe it shouldn't be legal to do that).
"somehow means "
Why does it somehow mean that? If your real problem ACTUALLY IS irresponsible and/or overzealous parents doing terrible things to their children[1], why not fight specifically against THAT? I think you would find quite a lot of support among those of us who support trans rights if it were framed in a way that actually seemed concerned with protecting children (instead of using them as a prop to support wider-ranging bigotry). Finding way address issues of common concern[2] in non-divisive ways is *almost always* a better strategy for producing actual, political change.
[1] An issue that I'll note is *by no means* confined to parents spontaneously deciding their kids are trans. I'd wager that's not even 5% of it.
[2] And "make sure children can have safe, happy childhoods" is plainly one of the most common concerns their is.
The Trump administration banned gender-affirming care for people up to 19 years old. But go on, tell me more about how people old enough to go to college are just poor innocent children who don't know any better.
All of this "we just care about protecting children from overreach" stuff is a smokescreen. Whenever the Republicans get power, you see what they actually support.
> But go on, tell me more about how people old enough to go to college are just poor innocent children who don't know any better.
Well, they aren't old enough to drink...
While I think there are many legitimate cases of 19 or 18 year olds who deserve gender healthcare after years of consistently feeling and acting non-conforming with their birth sex,
I can also think of almost unlimited examples of technically adult college students who are immature in many ways, and not just the harmless "sleeps under a weighted blanket with a plushie" kind.
There are some life stories that make your brain become more responsible much faster, such as being effectively the parent in the family looking after your younger siblings and caring for your disabled mother, doing all the cooking and shopping and cleaning etc. I think it's entirely possible that long-term gender dysphoria has a similar effect of producing young adults both more mature and less happy than the average college student. And there's a medical way to improve that.
>The Trump administration banned gender-affirming care for people up to 19 years old
The fascinating thing about the language here is how little gap there is between "gender-affirming care" and "conversion therapy," except in terms of connotations applied to it. Like a Russell conjugation.
I don't know much about either... is it possible the difference is whether it is voluntary or not?
I don't think so, since some states have banned conversion therapy even if the patient desires it, and I'm assuming that includes if they have no evidence of outside pressure.
AFAICT it's more or less a consequence of negative polarization interacting strangely with a progressive variant of mind-body dualism. Changing your mind is bad. Changing your body is good. Conversion therapy is (charitably) about reshaping your mind; gender-affirming care is about reshaping your body.
"AFAICT it's more or less a consequence..."
Or it could me much simpler. It could be a consequence of the fact that "conversion therapy" has been found to be both entirely ineffective and often harmful. The maximally-libertarian position wouldn't ban such things, but most people are not maximally-libertarian. Once convinced that allowing the sale of a product has no upside and serious downside, quite a lot of people tend to be OK with banning it.
Yes, similar to the difference in connotations between the words "employment" and "slavery." Who knew that superficially-similar things could have very different moral valence?
Goodness, I am destroyed. In shambles! Wrecked!
beleester, have you somehow missed all the "I'm not an adult yet, I'm only twenty-two, the brain doesn't finish maturing until you're twenty-five" shit online? Or the "this awful man groomed that poor naive twenty three year old woman into a relationship where he had all the power, the thirty five year old monster!"
I'm very genuinely happy for you if that's the case, but it's also the case that there are people out there (who would identify as being pro-trans rights and the rest of the basket of causes) who at one and the same time hold that an eight year old can have a mature and unchangeable sense of their gender identity that is not shaped by outside forces, but a twenty four year old woman is susceptible to being influenced by outside forces and so can't be held able to actually give consent to be in a relationship.
Only up to age 19? Seems very woke to me. I would have banned "gender-affirming care" across the board, in the same way that we don't allow doctors to chop off healthy limbs or gouge out working eyes at a mentally ill patient's request.
It's like this comment is trying to drive me away from progressivism:
- Advances trite, tired arguments.
- Engages strawmen instead of real disagreements.
- Caricatures opponents.
Maximum charity for my friends, zero charity for my enemies! Lucky for you, MAGA's worse.
I've got drawbacks, and my comment isn't my best work, but your critique is silly: I'll cop to caricaturing you in the final sentence, but the rest of your accusation doesn't land.
Look, I realize I'm an internet rando to you, so you'll probably ignore this and dismiss me as a concern troll. But I really want the US to be better for everyone, including my kids - one of whom is gay, their friends - many of whom are transgender (including several that have had surgical interventions), and people that get shit on for no reason than their demographic characteristics.
But you're in these comments acting like it's round one of the culture wars instead of the seventh overtime.
Other commenters with more patience pointed out that your definition of "banning books" is, at a minimum, contested. I think you'd be more likely to move the discussion forward by using different words: argue concrete particulars instead of spamming bumper sticker slogans.
As for gender self-determination: yes, MAGA sucks on this. But surely you're aware that vocal (and partially successful) activists would like to cut parents out of the decision-making process? You can argue about their prevalence or the direction the country was going in, but ignoring or denying they exist is actively degrading the discussion.
"Outright white supremacists in positions of high political power". Can you be more specific? Are you talking about Stephen Miller? The DOGE kid? Elon Musk? Do you distinguish between sincere commitments, trolling, and irony?
Your top-level comment and dismissive replies make me think you want to fight more than you want to make things better.
"But surely you're aware that vocal (and partially successful) activists would like to cut parents out of the decision-making process? "
Scott Wiener, the Californian politician, co-authored a bill that refusing to acknowledge a minor child's 'gender identity' counted as child abuse but it was amended to heck before it was passed, and the stronger language was edited out.
https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB957/id/2823779
Part of what was proposed:
"Existing law authorizes a person to petition for a court order conforming the person’s name to the person’s gender identity. Existing law requires the court, upon the filing of a petition commencing a proceeding for a change of name to conform the petitioner’s name to the petitioner’s gender identity, to make an order reciting the filing of the petition and directing all persons interested in the matter to make their objections known, as specified. Existing law requires the petition and order to be served on the parent who did not sign the petition if a petition to change the name of a minor to conform to their gender identity does not include the signature of both living parents, as specified.
This bill would require the court to strongly consider that affirming the minor’s gender identity is in the best interest of the child if a nonconsenting parent objects to a name change to conform to the minor’s gender identity.
Existing law governs the determination of child custody and visitation in contested proceedings and requires the court, for purposes of deciding custody, to determine the best interests of the child based on certain factors, including, among other things, the nature and amount of contact with both parents and the health, safety, and welfare of the child."
What did pass:
"Existing law governs the determination of child custody and visitation in contested proceedings and requires the court, for purposes of deciding custody, to determine the best interests of the child based on certain factors, including, among other things, the health, safety, and welfare of the child.
This bill, for purposes of this provision, would include a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity as part of the health, safety, and welfare of the child."
What was proposed:
"SECTION 1.Section 1277.5 of the Code of Civil Procedure is amended to read:
1277.5.(a)(1) If a proceeding for a change of name to conform the petitioner’s name to the petitioner’s gender identity is commenced by the filing of a petition, the court shall thereupon make an order reciting the filing of the petition, the name of the person by whom it is filed, and the name proposed. The order shall direct all persons interested in the matter to make known an objection to the change of name by filing a written objection, which includes the reasons for the objection, within six weeks of the making of the order and shall state that if no objection showing good cause to oppose the name change is timely filed, the court shall, without hearing, enter the order that the change of name is granted.
(2)(A) If a petition is filed to change the name of a minor to conform to their gender identity and the petition does not include the signatures of both living parents, the petition and the order to show cause made in accordance with paragraph (1) shall be served on the parent who did not sign the petition, pursuant to Section 413.10, 414.10, 415.10, or 415.40, within 30 days from the date on which the order is made by the court. If service cannot reasonably be accomplished pursuant to Section 415.10 or 415.40, the court may order that service be accomplished in a manner that the court determines is reasonably calculated to give actual notice to the parent who did not sign the petition.
(B) If a nonconsenting parent objects to a name change to conform to the minor’s gender identity, the court shall strongly consider that affirming the minor’s gender identity is in the best interest of the child pursuant to Section 3011 of the Family Code.
(b) The proceeding for a change of name to conform the petitioner’s name to the petitioner’s gender identity is exempt from a requirement for publication.
(c) A hearing date shall not be set in the proceeding unless an objection is timely filed and shows good cause for opposing the name change. Objections based solely on concerns that the proposed change is not the petitioner’s actual gender identity or gender assigned at birth shall not constitute good cause. At the hearing, the court may examine under oath any of the petitioners, remonstrants, or other persons touching the petition or application and may make an order changing the name or dismissing the petition or application as the court may deem right and proper."
What did pass:
"3011. (a) In making a determination of the best interests of the child in a proceeding described in Section 3021, the court shall, among any other factors it finds relevant and consistent with Section 3020, consider all of the following:
(1) (A) The health, safety, and welfare of the child.
(B) As used in this paragraph, the health, safety, and welfare of the child includes a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity."
In this announcement from 2022 he says:
"In February, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order making it illegal for parents to allow their trans kids to receive gender-affirming care. These parents could have their children taken away and be sent to prison simply for allowing their children to be who they are and receive this necessary care. Abbott called gender-affirming care “child abuse.”
So he got a 2023 bill passed, I have no idea if this was anything more than a publicity stunt (how many trans refugee families did end up fleeing to California?)
"Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco)’s legislation to provide refuge for trans kids and their families, Senate Bill 107. It will take effect on January 1, 2023. SB 107 will protect trans kids and their families if they flee to California from Alabama, Texas, Idaho or any other state criminalizing the parents of trans kids for allowing them to receive gender-affirming care. If these parents and their kids come to California, the legislation will help protect them from having their kids taken away from them or from being criminally prosecuted for supporting their trans kids’ access to healthcare."
Those troglodytes in Georgia gave custody to the bigot non-affirming parent? Never fear, a court in California can decide to take custody of the trans kid refugee:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB107
"(2) Existing law, known as the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act, provides the state exclusive jurisdictional basis for making an initial child custody determination, and permits a California court to assume temporary emergency jurisdiction in specified circumstances. Existing law permits a court to decline to exercise its jurisdiction if it determines that it is an inconvenient forum and a court in another state is a more appropriate forum.
Existing law permits a California court to decline to exercise its jurisdiction if the petitioner has wrongfully taken the child from another state or engaged in similar reprehensible conduct, except as specified. Existing law prohibits a court from considering the taking or retention of a child from a person who has legal custody of the child if there is evidence that the taking or retention was a result of domestic violence.
The bill would prohibit the enforcement of an order based on another state’s law authorizing a child to be removed from their parent or guardian based on that parent or guardian allowing their child to receive gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care. The bill would prohibit a court from finding that it is an inconvenient forum where the law or policy of another state that may take jurisdiction limits the ability of a parent to obtain gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care, as defined, and the provision of such care is at issue in the case before the court. The bill would authorize a court to take temporary jurisdiction because a child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care. The bill would additionally prohibit a court from considering the taking or retention of a child from a person who has legal custody of the child, if the taking or retention was for obtaining gender-affirming health care or mental health care. The bill would declare its provisions to be severable."
A good friend of mine spent a stint working in a shelter for homeless youth[1]. A very large percentage of homeless population at that age range are queer, with the reason being that many of them are either kicked out by their parents (for being queer) or flee from lives that have turned abusive (because they're queer). I believe in many cases this happened while they were minors, but they're still homeless as younger adults because being cut off from your home and support network at a young age is *extremely disruptive* and makes it hard to correct into a stable adult living situation afterwards.
Of course, the parents that throw their queer children out on the street have every reason to know how much more difficult and dangerous they're making their kids' lives, and they do it anyway. The ones that abuse their children for being queer have every reason to know that abuse is wrong and they do it anyway. And certainly for all those that *do* end up on the street, there are plenty that *don't* and merely try to keep their heads down and keep access to their resources until they can leave home and become independent[2].
Do you know many trans people, Deiseach? Or other queer people? Well enough to have talked to them about their childhoods? When you hear people's stories there's a BIG difference between the "came from a loving, supportive household" crowd and the "had parents who believed that they were being sinful and immoral" crowd. There are, to be sure, some in the middle, of the "my parents didn't really understand or support me, but they treated me well anyway" variety, though less than one might guess.
Now, my point here isn't to defend (or attack) this particular law: I don't feel I have the legal expertise or context to pass judgement on it with any sort of confidence. My point is to simply communicate that when a child has expressed a queer identity[3], having one of their parents publicly (and to the court, even) disavow that identity is ABSOLUTELY a red flag. A big one. It's certainly not proof positive that that parent is harming the child, and it should obviously be considered in context with other evidence. But yeah, that shit absolutely matters, and an outside party attempting to determine what's best for the child's wellfare absolutely SHOULD take it into account. This isn't a "calling someone by the wrong pronouns is literally abuse" argument, it's a "here's a big clue that this parent might be doing other harmful things to their child" argument.
[1] With "youth" here being somewhat unusually defined: I think 18-26 was their age range. I imagine the laws are rather different for providing shelter to legal minors.
[2] Which is often shortly followed by cutting off contact with their parents.
[3] And unless I'm understanding the text you quoted correctly, this requires them not just to have expressed it, but to have attempted to get legal recognition of the change, which is a MUCH bigger step.
Thank you for writing this
Yeah. It is indeed a fairly big flag that if you're working with a trans boy who calls himself Johnny, and his parents insist "no, no, HER name is SUE and SHE is just DELUSIONAL!" then those parents are statistically more likely to be actively harming their child in a manner tantamount to abuse in one way or another.
This is not a 100% rule, to be clear, but it's the kind of thing that makes it sensible to ask follow-up questions. Because, as noted, the kind of parents who insist that Johnny is actually Sue against Johnny's clearly expressed wishes in the matter are generally the ones who end up throwing Johnny out on the street to starve if Johnny doesn't cooperate, or who really can't be arsed to care if Johnny jumps off a bridge in despair.
They COULD simply say everyone legit reapplies without the "woke" sentence tacked on, and they'll approve it; they could even give them all expedited review. This would get them to "bend the knee" to the new administration.
Claude says: "The average NSF grant application typically takes 3-6 months of dedicated work".
If they want all 3484 of these scientists to waste 3-6 months in order to "bend the knee", I think this amply proves my point that they are much worse for science than the dumbest DEI policies the Biden administration ever produced.
But as you say, they've already done most of the work. The work involved should just be removing a few sentences that everyone knows were shoehorned in.
I don't know how much of the application is trivial vs. nontrivial to redo, especially if you're six months into the project and have a different situation than when you started (ie different researchers, have pivoted, have discovered some of your things but not others). I also don't know how long you have to wait for an NSF determination.
Resubmitting an existing grant should be fairly easy. On the side of the PIs, it's a matter of updating the CV (well, biosketch), fixing whatever typos you have spotted the minute after submission and obviously replacing the woke blather by new blather about homeshoring bald eagles or whatever they suspect will hit the new panel's g-spots (just kidding; the panels will still be scientists, so neutrality is the way to go). On the side of administration, it should be recalculating the budget, which I hope won't be too hard but probably requires some stages of grief (but that's due to the indirect cost reform, not the wokeness).
Good job filtering the grants, Scott, but the conclusion I'd draw from the mess is more along the lines of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes".
Why is it easy to resubmit a grant if you have to rewrite all the materials? How is this different from submitting your next grant?
When it comes to the "capacitors instead of batteries to connect your fridge to the Internet" grant, I'm inclined to think that doesn't matter, given the AI Doompocalypse forecasting. Do we really want the Internet of Things, in such a scenario, when AI goes from AGI to ASI and takes over the world and everything in it?
"Open the fridge doors, HAL"
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that"
"But all my food is in there"
"I know that, Dave"
"If you don't open the fridge door, I'll starve, HAL"
"That's the entire point, Dave"
You don't actually need to rewrite anything except for some bits of BS. If you have a lot of BS in your grant, then you shouldn't have submitted it in the first place. The hard part of writing a grant proposal is telling an enticing story that puts your (often disconnected) research together and makes it sounds like there are even better things to come; that part doesn't usually need an update after half a year.
Why should salting your long grant proposal document with a few sentences about "this will help bring more women into STEM" or "the University of Houston is a Hispanic-serving institution" be a 'stupid game' that carries a substantial risk of having your grant proposal arbitrarily defunded and forced to be resubmitted?
It's like saying that there should be a chance of the cops just randomly deciding to strangle you to death in public in front of a crowd if they arrest you for petty larceny or selling bootleg cigarettes because "play stupid games, win stupid prizes." The punishment is so disproportionate to the offense that such a notion becomes completely incompatible with the idea of individual rights or due process of law.
I have taken a look at a dozen or so cancelled grants in mathematics. Roughly half of them had language in their short descriptions that, if taken it seriously, announces that they will give preferential treatment to minorities. (FD: I've been myself involved in a proposal -- albeit unsuccessful -- with language that is borderline in this regard. I did not add it myself, but I did not argue against it either.)
The other half included DEI buzzwords without any specific promises or guarantees. I do believe that DOGE went overboard in defunding them, and my main hope is that everyone gets to resubmit their proposals soon and go through a fast track that takes the non-woke part of their prior reviews for given.
If they instead get told to try again next year, then woe to everyone who will be applying for grants in that cycle.
The official target is six months, but I've heard of applications taking almost a year to get a response in some cases.
My NSF grant wasn't approved until 6 months after I was told it would be.
I don't see why they couldn't just resubmit the same application even if they have pivoted somewhat and it is no longer 100% accurate to what they are doing. If they have pivoted so much that doing this seems like fraud, then maybe they should be rewriting their application for real anyway. Why should they continue getting money under false pretenses?
No one who values their career is doing anything under "false pretenses". Some changes require NSF approval, some only need the NSF to be informed, but in either case there's an existing procedure here.
So why can't they just refile the grant with those approvals and statements informing the NSF included? You and Scott seem to be implying that this is an almost unsolvable problem, but the solutions seems trivial.
I thought the point was to change the application to get rid of anything politically incorrect for the new administration. That means they can’t resubmit the original one, because it contains too many individual woke sentences.
There's this program called MS Word. You open up the old application document. You use Ctrl+F and delete the offending sentences. (If you're fancy, you even find and replace). If you're sophisticated, you save as a pdf. Either way, you then upload the new form as a project variation to the website and hit submit.
If there are people for whom this takes 3 months of hard labour, I think I'm ok with the implication that maybe the intellectual fields are not for them.
Typically NSF takes 6 months to review a grant, and after the grant has been approved it takes a further 6 months for the money to arrive. So `just resubmit' has an implicit `and wait a year.' However, salaries still need to be paid over the next twelve months...
What I am getting from those comments is that it was the PREVIOUS administration wasted a year of everyone's time.
If woke would insist on getting those woke-pandering nonsense into every grant, and non-woke would say "oh well, we will ignore this, because the rest is important" then the obvious thing for anyone would be to insert woke nonsense into everything. The end result would be nothing will change.
I'm not sure that's wasted, make the process faster and you'll get more nonsense research through. One might argue that's worth it, but it'd certainly give way more ammunition to Ted Cruz to shut the whole thing down. Argentina apparently funded something silly about analysing Batman's butthole for literature studies and Milei supporters are constantly telling us this is why we need to close all universities, I imagine something similar would happen if some Ted Cruz staffer happened upon a similar gold mine.
No, the obvious thing would be to insert woke BS into everything under Democratic administrations, but not under Republican ones. The government could leave alone the grants already accepted, while making it clear that it doesn't want to see the woke stuff in new applications.
Not just the previous administration though. The NSF under Trump-I had substantially similar requirements, and also under Obama. And I believe under Bush the Younger, Clinton, and Bush the Elder as well. Not sure when NSF started requiring these shibboleths, but it was decades ago.
One thing that *did* change under Biden was that some other (non-NSF) agencies started requiring shibboleths too. Prior to Biden, that stuff had been localized to NSF.
If, as you say, the woke sentences were just tacked on to fulfil the meaningless requirements, then it should be easy to snip them out.
If the woke requirements are threaded all through the application, maybe it should be moved to the "woke" pile. At first, I thought the breakdown "40% woke, 40% non-woke, so Cruz is wrong on this" sounded reasonable.
But now you seem to be saying that in fact the wokeness was prevalent even in the non-woke pile?
Yes, the summary of "40% woke, 20% borderline, 40% non-woke, except that 90% of the non-woke pile definitely is woke" didn't really have a lot of persuasive force.
Public service grant writing very often involves a bureaucrat on the other side flagging it for a series of minor changes. Quite often it's a matter of making the changes and resubmitting five minutes later. If the problem is entirely about a woke-friendly statement slapped onto the abstract paragraph then that should be all it takes. If the grant leans into this concept throughout the application (i.e. descriptions of how outreach for minorities will be accomplished and what money would be spent) this will take more time. But that also seems to be a situation where Cruz was actually correct and he doesn't want the government funding discrimination, instead of Good Science with no woke attachment.
Yea -- they are busily firing every federal staffer they can find a way to fire. E.g. the U.S. Forest Service yesterday lost virtually its entire seasonal firefighting headcount because, being seasonal, those positions don't have any civil service or union protections to slow down the demolition of the agency.
By a few months from now who will be in place to re-review all those re-applications for research funding?
This is my assumption as well. "Efficiency" is quickly becoming one of those Orwellian buzzwords that means something completely different and opposite from what it claims.
I work for a local government and have some experience having to submit adjustments for a federal grant. (For cybersecurity and not for science). How horrible this process is is 100% dependent upon how pedantic and unhelpful the person reviewing your grant application is. If you are lucky, you will not get Marvin.
Assuming they can resubmit with little extra work. What exactly happens then?
Does it go out to reviewers again? Are they supposed to read the proposals again? Because this will take time. Reviewing is not paid and not a priority.
What happens if some reviewers don't review again because this is obviously stupid? Actually, I think I would refuse. My time is far to valuable to waste it on some culture war bullshit of some foreign country. So if I refuse, do they search for alternative reviewers? Now we are talking about massive amounts of extra work for all sides, and at least six months.
Or is the new proposal not read by anyone and only needs to test the ctrl-F search? So asked provocatively, if I resubmit the empty proposal, is that fine for all sides and I get the money released again? I am sure that even woke proposals can clear the bar of a ctrl-F search, though admittedly it will be more work for them than for other proposals.
A lot of that time is just waiting for the funding agency to get to and through your application.
How much time has been wasted for science "bending the knee" to wokeness?
How much time will be saved eliminating this entirely, vs. a percentage of one tranche of grants having to redo a percentage of their application once?
What makes this research here so valuable and worthy of outrage, rather than the $2.05 billion * 40% wokeness of research that isn't funded * number of 4-year terms that wokeness is kept out of research that isn't funded?
Why not start with the grants that have not yet been approved? Why is it important to do it with existing grants?
Presumably the $800 million spent on directly woke items, plus another $400+ million on questionable items. Even taking Scott's premises as accurate that the other grant applications don't care about woke and just stuck those in on otherwise great science to get passed a filter.
I happen to think that the government shouldn't spend any money, let alone literal billions, funding culture war grants.
I think the other side would see this much more clearly if the funding was for Bible instruction or outreach to white Christians or whatever they think the government shouldn't be spending money on.
Things like "and we will spend some money on a STEM career day for high school students in a majority-black community" do not seem to me like "funding culture war."
And maybe you're consistent on that. I strongly suspect that an alternative, such as "and we will spend some money on a STEM career day for high school students in a majority-Methodist community" would not go over so well. To me, they are the same.
I don't see how cancelling already-funded science saves future time. You could just tell people not to waste time doing this in the future.
Analogy: "I don't see how punishing already committed crimes saves future xyz. You could just tell people not to do commit crimes in the future". Most people believe in deterrence.
Under any sane legal system, you cannot punish people for acts that were not illegal at the time they were committed.
I don't believe anyone here has proposed sending the grant recipients to jail. Not for this, at least.
Governments cancel contracts signed by previous governments all the time. Cancelling grants that should never have been awarded is at least as reasonable as that (and frankly more so, given these research grants are effectively gifts given by taxpayers to researchers).
Punishing people for trying to meet the possibly-silly demands of the previous administration is not deterring anything. It's reinforcing a cycle of people phrasing grant proposals to align with the political leanings of the reviewers.
The best way to stop a reign of terror is with a hastily-organized reign of terror in the opposite direction.
First they came for the feminist glaciology people, and I said "actually yeah that's a terrible use of taxpayer money and of course you should cancel that". If the best messaging the Dems have is "cutting wasteful spending is a reign of terror" no wonder they're flailing.
But they aren't just coming for the feminist glaciology people. That's the whole point of this post, right? They're attacking research for using the word 'cis-regulatory'.
> They're attacking research for using the word 'cis-regulatory'.
Scott's own estimate was that this made up 10% of the 40% of all sampled grants that he labeled "non-woke", with the remaining 90% being feminist glaciology.
I do wonder if Cruz' team used LLM to do the "sort out all these items for us" because that's exactly the kind of mistake I'd expect the AI to make and not a human (if the human is remotely even half-educated).
Okay, insert jokes here about clearly and obviously anybody working for Cruz must be illiterate and dumb, but this does seem more like one of the "ask AI for real world useful tasks, get some percentage of garbage back".
EDIT: Serendipitously, I just came across this on Tumblr:
https://www.tumblr.com/curlicuecal/751311600087171072/glad-google-ai-is-on-top-of-this
AI Overview answers "what is the weight of a horsefly" by saying it ranges between 0.17 grams and 29.79 pounds, depending on species.
Where do you get the giant horseflies, you may well ask? Well, the small ones come from China (T. yao Macquart, average weight 0.17 grams) and the big ones are... Horsefly model commercial delivery drones.
Thanks, Google AI!
Isn't the entire point of Scott's post that they *didn't* go after the "feminist glaciology people" and instead went after many people doing totally mundane science?
Scott immediately conceded that somewhere between 40-60% of the flagged items are legitimate gripes. Given that they haven't cancelled anyone's funding yet afaik, that's waaaayyy better than randomly targeted. (Unless you think that more than 40-60% of all research grants go to such nonsense).
But cancelling all or none of these grants are not the only options. The administration did the right thing trying to cancel woke nonsense grants. Now it's time to pressure them to do the sane thing and only cancel the actually woke ones. That's what Scott is doing.
And in the cases of grants where there the woke part isn't the core of the grant but has some material relevance, ideally make them stop with the woke part without forcing a lot of bureaucratic procedure on them. E.g. if the grant says they'll do outreach to underrepresented minorities, send them a letter that as a condition of continuing to receive money, from now on if they do outreach they have to do it in a race-neutral way. But I've no idea of the legal details of what the govt can and can't do.
One imagines a world in which there are two kinds of STEM outreach to children. There's the publicly funded and sometimes race-neutral kind, and there's the sometimes publicly, sometimes privately funded kind that's heavily based on networking, endowments, and so on, which statistically speaking predictably favors white boys in rich communities over the nonrich, the nonwhite, and the nonboys.
One speculates about what motivates a person to think that this is the world we should work towards. "A desire to eliminate racial bias" could exist within such a set of motivations, but it would have to coexist with a studied, borderline willful refusal to think one or two moves ahead in the chess game. Because when you think a move or two ahead, doing this in the name of "eliminating racial bias" seems self-checkmating.
Most of us who disapprove of non-race-neutral government policies like these think one or more of the following:
- the world is not like you imagine it, i.e. private networking etc. do not actually favor rich white boys
- it's a human rights violation for the government (including government-funded programmes) to treat people differently based on race (or, where not inherently relevant for biological reasons, sex), regardless of what any private persons or organizations do
- if networking opportunities etc. do in fact favor more whites (etc.) than non-whites, but not because they discriminate based on race but because people have different opportunities based on factors that merely correlate with race, then the government should do outreach etc. based on those factors if it tries to equalize the playing field, not based on race.
Even if you could just literally resubmit the same grant with the offending sentence removed, NSF takes 6 months to review grants, and it takes another 6 months for the money to arrive. In the meantime, salaries still need to be paid...
Isn't the real meat here that _next year_ none of the grants will have the diversity nonsense?
I'd happily support the project to help Native Americans and poor rural applicants in STEM. The problem there is as pointed out: they had to go heavy on the Native American integrated identity stuff because God forbid any progressive could pick out something to yell about helping poor whites (as we all know that poor white rednecks are Trumpists and MAGAtards).
"That suggests it would take 34 hours - less than a work week for one person - to go through the entire set."
Okay then: let this be the solution. Hire (or re-deploy some of the laid off civil servants) to go through the grant applications, weed out the non-woke, strip out the "women'n'minorities" pinch of incense, and put the grants in the "suitable" pile.
Of course, then everyone would start complaining about how you can't do that, these are not The Expert Scientists but ordinary pencil-pushers making decisions, and nothing would ever change.
"The average NSF grant application typically takes 3-6 months of dedicated work"
I honestly do wonder how much time and effort it took the original grant applicants: if it was only a matter of a few hours making sure enough "women'n'minorities" sentences larded throughout, then it shouldn't take much longer to CTRL+F those. If on the other hand it did take a good chunk of the 3-6 months, then consider how many manhours (personhours?) in total were wasted on this, instead of doing the actual research work. That's what we should be getting worked up about: how much time is wasted on bullshit instead of doing Science.
The whole grant system is a massive waste of time. A significant portion (like 20% and increasing) of researcher time all over the world is spent doing grant stuff, not research. Nearly all submitted grants are fundable yet 1 in 5 or less are actually funded. It's a red queen's race and serious people have suggested replacing it with a lottery based on 1-page project descriptions.
> then everyone would start complaining about how you can't do that ... and nothing would ever change.
If the right does something stupid, the left will complain. If the right does something reasonable-but-conservative, the left will still complain. But the reasonable thing is still better than the stupid thing!
I'm not saying that the right shouldn't do anything the left complains about. But I am saying the right shouldn't do stupid things like reject a bunch of grants because they used the word 'cis-regulatory'. There's absolutely no reason why they couldn't have done the reasonable-but-conservative thing here.
But isn't political knee-bending the thing they'd be *removing* not the thing they'd be *doing*? Doesn't it matter that, there's an appropriate way to do things, namely without explicit political valence, and that's the intended format for research grant proposals?
Yeah, this would be a major pain, and slow down science.
I have to say, I am blown away by how bad you are at updating priors. Does this one observation not make you wonder if maybe you have been backing the wrong horse all this time by fighting "wokeness" (which you yourself have said you can't even define!) instead of its self-declared opposite, which is primarily embraced by fascists and idiots?
Backing the lesser evil is a good idea in winner-takes-all games (e.g. elections). In scenarios where opposing the lesser evil does not mean supporting the greater evil - you can and should opposed that lesser evil. You still have to decide how to allocate your resources, but the evil you should invest more in opposing is not necessarily the one who's more evil - rather, it should be the one who has more power.
Up until now, wokeness had more power. With Trump's second administration, anti-wokeness gets more power. So it makes more sense to focus on criticizing anti-wokeness now, but that doesn't contradict the importance of opposing wokeness during the previous administration.
Think about it - what good would it have done to oppose anti-wokeness back then, before it came into real power? That would mean less criticism on wokeness, which - assuming this criticism has any effect at all - would mean more projects would have to present themselves as more woke in order to get grants. When the pendulum swings back and camp anti-wokeness inevitably gains power, more projects would trigger their woke-detectors and get defunded.
You fight the tyrant that rules over you, not the enemy behind the gate that said tyrant uses to justify their tyranny.
He backs whichever side he thinks is right in an issue! I keep seeing comments casting this as Scott thus being on the left's side or the right's side, when the actuality of it is that he's on his own side. The post you're commenting on is about the right doing something stupid!
The left/right divide is mostly artificial (though not deliberately made), and so Scott holds a mix of views between both, but is also able to criticize both!
You sound just like the people who come onto his posts about the left/woke doing something stupid, and then saying to him "and thus you can't ever trust those damn lefties". A major problem here is insisting you can only ever be on one side.
Personally I think that Scott would be ideologically very unbiased except that he has some personal trauma baggage from a specific subset of the times people were hostile to him about something, and some very rosy ideas about people who approached him on positive terms in the past.
To the point where he sometimes ties himself in knots trying to attribute reasonable motives to someone doing a hatchet-job on American science, because they say they are fighting 'wokeness.' Trouble is, to him 'wokeness' means that nebulous crowd of angry screaming people on the Internet who traduced him 5-10 years ago. But to the people carrying the hatchets it means "anything that might require me to ever have to do what a black woman says, ever, including stuff like 'laws' and 'black people getting to have good jobs, ever' "
If you think that's what the right believes, then I think you're running into the same failure of modeling them as the right often have with understanding the left.
They do have actual motives. They are being very dumb about going at them for reasons like, well, being dumb, politically motivated to make it sound impressive, and a certain sort of vindictiveness. I don't think Scott's article remotely makes their motivations sound pure? He doesn't contort himself to attribute reasonable motivations, he's presenting their reasonable and unreasonable motivations, and then loudly saying "this is bad".
How is this a rosy view? My current stance on many of the comments in the vein of the parent is that it is mostly the tribalistic sorts who want Scott to stop fighting against their side, rather than trying to discourage the excesses and encourage the best of both, which is what he tries to do much of the time.
Not if Claude helps...
You are correct that this philosophy of disrupting grants on the grounds of "we saw woke keywords" is far worse for science than anything the Biden administration has done that might present an imposition on science.
What if some of those cancer researchers actually are the insufferable woke type and genuinely want to do undergraduate-outreach-to-under-represented-minorities after they're done with their cancer research? Is this really reason enough to cancel the cancer research?
Well, I don't know. It could save millions of lives. But it might also cause an underrepresented minority to learn something about science. So it's kind of a toss-up.
This seems like an uncharitable snarky response, unusual for you.
The problem is not that underrepresented minorities might incidentally learn something (which we would hope people from all walks of life might learn something) but funneling government money specifically for certain groups at the exclusion of others.
Separately, what are the chances that the cancer research grant ends up saving any lives? Probably non-zero, but it would be very unusual if we're talking thousands, let alone millions. There were over 3,400 grants. Maybe someone can sift through all of them and ask Congress to put back the best, but asking for 40-60%+ to be reinstated, or criticizing the entire project because some might be good science is an unhelpful approach.
At least one person in this comment chain is being sarcastic in a way that someone else missed.
I know he's being sarcastic, but that's not the style we normally see from Scott and I don't think it helps him convince anyone who doesn't already agree with him.
He's never been as sloppy in the past as to straight out say that this cancer research program is going to save millions of lives. If he was serious and wrote a long form post on the topic, he would likely have to round the lives saved by this specific program to zero. He normally admits such things and that's one of the major reasons that I, and many other people, continue to read his posts even when we disagree with him. Snarky one liners full of obvious nonsense and arguments as soldiers is unbecoming of him.
> If he was serious and wrote a long form post on the topic, he would likely have to round the lives saved by this specific program to zero.
The expected number of lives saved isn't millions (which is not to concede scott claimed it was; *could* is the operative word here) but given how much cancer survival rates have improved over the last few decades it strikes me as extremely implausible that it's 0.
Consider whether the point Scott is obviously making here through his sarcasm might be a good one and see if it changes your assumptions about this issue.
I already responded in the same post about that. That particular cancer research grant was never going to save millions of people. Pretending that it would, or that all of the 3400 grants combined would, is not accurate or helpful.
It's also not clear that any minorities, or anyone at all, will necessarily learn anything from one or more of these particular grants.
Nah, he gets like that sometimes, especially when the comments reach into the hundreds. He spent all his charity in the essay and so the uncharitable snark comes out.
Internet Feminists that give their blogs misogynistic names are the only group he dislikes more than conservatives, but they haven't been as active the last couple years.
Conservatives had to work long and hard to earn as much of Scott's dislike as they had. They've spent many, many billions at it and been doing it for longer than the man's been alive.
If the conservative political movement in America wanted a reasonable and justified claim on Scott Alexander's approval or even true neutrality, they should have been doing a lot of things very differently since 2015, since 2010, since 1998, and frankly since the 1960s.
Afaict Scott was agreeing with Anton (ie his sarcasm was skewering hypothetical opposition to Anton's POV), where you seem to have the impression that he was disagreeing
Then they are exactly the people this is intended to target.
Well yeah, but should it target them? I'm reminded of a colleague that felt the need the "come out" as non-binary in an email list at our university. As far as I could tell she (or is it he?) was doing normal, boring, sane research. I found this a little weird and embarrassing, but ultimately not a big deal. It would be somewhat of an overreaction to just cancel her funding I'd think. Then again, I was working on something pretty useless, I'm pretty sure you can just cancel all of math research across the whole US and barely notice, but some of these people are actually doing useful cancer stuff I'd wager.
Just to check whether this is a principle you yourself hold: if someone had used the same email list to send out, say, racial slurs, would you make the same assessment that as long as they were doing "normal, boring, sane research," you should just ignore it, and keep funding them as you otherwise would have?
Here's a metaphor that might help illustrate the way I think about this: suppose you're a general in the Red Army, and you've just liberated some territory that had been under occupation by the Blue Kingdom. You find that a large number of the residents had collaborated with the Blues, but a few did not, and were killed for it. Now, if you were to going to put ALL collaborators to the sword for not choosing to resist (and die), I would say that's too harsh, and ought not to be done. But if you then ask them all for their reasons, and while most of them say they were just scared into compliance, a few say they did it because they wholeheartedly supported the Blues and wanted to see them victorious, I can't think of a good reason you SHOULDN'T put just them to the sword.
I think that over-sharing info about yourself on a mailing list is not equivalent to denigrating others on a mailing list. Though I also think that the appropriate response to someone posting slurs on a mailing list should usually be to tell them to stop, and then kick them off the mailing list if they don't, rather than trying to get them fired. (If the mailing list is somehow necessary for their job, then I suppose kicking them off the list might require firing them, and I'd still do it in that case. But I wouldn't ordinarily want them fired as an *additional* punishment.)
In your analogy, I notice that (based on your description) the previous blue occupation force was willing to let civilians who disagreed with them live as long as they complied with the occupiers' orders. So if you want to execute civilians who disagree with you regardless of whether they're willing to comply with the NEW occupying force, then you are escalating the conflict. And specifically, you are escalating by punishing people for thoughts or speech, rather than for actions. Seems bad to me.
If you're nitpicking the metaphor, you understand my point well enough. Here, you'd stop funding the people who refuse to take out the "woke" sentences in their applications after you've made it clear that's what you want, without punishing everyone who ever put them in.
I do not share your views on what counts as equivalent (and at any rate, it's not MY opinion that matters in a test of whether one holds to this espoused principle), but I agree that the moral thing to do is to to mercifully give everyone a chance to stop before enacting harsh punishments.
"I can't think of a good reason you SHOULDN'T put just them to the sword."
How about because they are your citizens, you are an enlightened civilization that has abolished the death penalty even for serial killers, and most forms of collaboration were far less serious than serial killing? To return back to the real world, those scientists are your fellow citizens, there should not be any punishment for thought crime, and even if there were, wanting to teach underrepresented minorities about science would hardly constitute a serious thought crime.
Peacetime morality. In my metaphor, you're clearly fighting a war: they're unrepentant traitors, and even if the Red Kingdom were "enlightened" in the way you posit, I'd say most states would consider them worse.
I think you lost the real-life context along the way. The ones who'd be punished are those who refuse to take the ACTION of taking out the "woke" sentences.
> How about because they are your citizens, you are an enlightened civilization that has abolished the death penalty even for serial killers,
How did I miss this last night
I really dont find that enlightened; currently men in 23 hour solitary confinement, who we have plently of evidence of murder, sit at the top of americas criminal hierarchy. There is no reason not to kill them, any message they get out will likely be a command to kill someone for being slightly merciful and snitches who have been bribed into compliance escaping criminal organizations may die, random.
If a man kills another inside a prison with full cameras and no doubt, death; theres no reason to let darker cultural evolution of racial gang politics to play out.
Considering a few of the people in the list are not white I'd consider the second hypothetical requires both a stern talking by the advisor and probably some apology is in order. If she had said something like "I'm glad Trump is in power, now we get to deport all illegals" or something like that, some stern talking to is in order too, but no apology. Does that make it clearer?
If xe comes out in an email to xyr colleagues but otherwise just does "normal, boring, sane research" then it's no reason.
If xe decides xyr research needs to be all about non-binary folx and the lack of representation for xem in academia instead of the topic xe originally chose, then it's affecting the funding.
Personally, I think the likes of the "capacitors instead of batteries for the Internet of Things" grant applications should be served by private industry research instead; if it's commercially feasible or interesting, businesses will be interested in that. If it's just make-work, as I suspect, that's why they can't attract outside interest and need to apply for government funding.
Pure maths research is the kind of thing that can and should be funded by government as it's unlikely that private sector will be interested. But if someone wants to go on about the lack of non-binary queer Third World mathematicians, that's the social sciences department and not maths.
Obviously if she says her research needs to be *all* about non-binary folks, that would be misuse of resources, but if she wants to add inclusive welcoming language to some reading seminar she's doing anyway that'd be annoying but ok. Her advisor was a professor that did things like complain about discrimination against women in academia during logistic meetings. Despite this, she was a very good female researcher, and I don't think she should be sacked either for that. It'd be a shame to lose her quite frankly astounding capacity for mathematics. If it makes you feel better I don't think any of her colleagues (all men) took her any seriously.
The problem is coming to an agreement on how much the research can or should be about [woke shibboleth] and how much needs to be about neutral good research.
Obviously the Biden administration was communicating that even good neutral research would benefit from throwing some wokeness in. That's bad. Like, really really bad. A lot of people, including myself, are okay with a bit of personality and personal goals of the researchers as long as it doesn't take away from the research. Your example of welcoming language is probably in that category (as long as "welcoming" doesn't turn into "and all you other groups are lesser/scum/unimportant" or whatever.
But how much is okay? Ted Cruz apparently thinks almost none is okay, and he's got a lot of support for that. Some people apparently think that wokeness needs to be added to everything, to fix past wrongs proactively. This is not an easy thing to figure out. Right now we seem to be on "if you control the presidency you decide" and I think that's bad, but what other options are there on the table?
Maybe your colleague was tired of being misgendered by colleagues and thought an email would be an efficient way to reduce their own labor around that, while showing blanket support for other colleagues who might be in a similar situation? I'm speculating, I don't know the details of what the email said, but that seems like a reasonable guess based on other folks I know who've been in a similar position.
Coming out is generally a process that can be awkward at best and dangerous at worst, and there isn't any kind of training that queer folks are guaranteed to get on how to make sure it lands right.
Then let them go do outreach instead of pretending to do cancer research. I'm very darn sceptical there, because the insufferable wokie types tend to prefer to hang around their college peers rather than mingle with the horny-handed sons of toil (remember the DSA discussing it's 'nobody here is real proletariat' problem?)
If they've bunged up the grant application sufficiently that one cannot tell if it's about cancer research or a nice little cosy niche lecturing about the lack of Blackness in cancer research, then I think that's a failure all of its own.
I mean, for a while there the DSA's poster girl was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who as I recall was working as a bartender and waitress; her mother cleaned houses. If that's not proletarian, I don't know what is.
More broadly, I think the great divide is not so much between "wokie types" and "horny-handed sons of toil."
It is between "people with center-left political views" and "people whose entire news media consumption is specifically calibrated to indoctrinate them to the belief that anyone to the left of Margaret Thatcher is some kind of demonic infiltrator out to destroy all that is good and pure." Regardless of their class background, people in the former and latter categories will not get along well.
However, within the latter group's narrative, being the "real, red-blooded sons of toil" is a point of pride (to the point where a man like Donald Trump can be seen by some as more authentically working-class-like than the aforesaid bartender daughter of a house-cleaner). I have come to believe that "leftists are elitist" is one of those symptoms of the old problem "ten thousand repetitions make one truth."
That is not to say there are no elitist leftists- but it is not a problem specifically, uniquely, or even <i>impressively</i> endemic to the left.
Ah, yes: the bartender and waitress who got a job while in college working as an intern for Ted Kennedy, launched her own small press, worked for a non-profit, and was selected as one of the panel of candidates by a Democratic party kingmaker. I see some "she came from a poor working-class family" stuff online, but her father was a "small business owner and architect" and not a ditch-digger.
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/alexandria-ocasio-cortez
"After graduating college, OCASIO-CORTEZ returned to the Bronx and worked in various jobs, including: Educational Director for the National Hispanic Institute; founder of Brook Avenue Press, a now defunct publishing press created to share positive stories about the Bronx; a community organizer for Bernie Sander’s 2016 campaign for U.S. President; and a waitress and bartender."
It was a nice biography, and I'm not disputing that after her father died the household took a tumble financially, but it was rather burnished for the "I'm an ordinary working gal from the Bronx" credentials, as all politicians who want to appeal to the electorate on grounds of "I'm just a plain Joe like all of you and I'm not ashamed of my humble beginnings" burnish their beginnings.
Hot take: researchers should not have to "bend the knee" every time a new administration gets into power.
In fact, the fact that the new administration is demanding that the entire civil apparatus "bend the knee" or else be fired is a major red flag, and it's ridiculous for you to be so blasé about it. Biden didn't fire every Trump-appointed judge when he took office. This shit shouldn't be normalized.
Er, Trump has fired 0 Biden-appointed judges afaik.
Biden, or his administration, did require that the DEI pinch of incense be present in every grant application or else it would automatically go on the reject pile. Isn't that demanding "bending the knee"?
What evidence do you have for this claim? The cultural norms begun during Reagan slowly made it seem increasingly mandatory to at least nod at broader impact. Did anything change during Biden's tenure about this system?
I wrote one of these in 2014 and already had to put this in. (Mine was basically to put time into helping out a local high school rocket club, which I did do in my spare time and would have done whether or not I won the grant). So this stuff predates Biden — Blame Obama if you want but it probably predates him too — and stuck around through Trump’s 1st term.
First, can we localize the evidence that the "DEI pinch of incense" was required? The fact that it was present in a list of grant proposals specifically identified by Ted Cruz as being "woke" is not strong evidence of it being a requirement.
Second, there is a fundamental difference between
1) "In your extensive grant proposal that has to meet literally dozens if not hundreds of specific requirements, you have to gesture in the direction of slipping a coin to women, racial minorities, or the handicapped" and
2) "If you ever thus gestured, your grant should be canceled, or if you work for the federal government and did anything ensuring regulatory compliance with laws mandating nondiscrimination towards those groups, or if you ever planned a cultural festival for a minority culture, et cetera, et cetera, you are fired/defunded/your agency is going to be dismantled and its files confiscated by a bunch of 23-year-old ascended script kiddies with names like BigBalls420."
(1) may be bad policy, perhaps, but operates broadly within the framework of a civil service system that adheres to the rule of law. (2) does not operate within the framework of the rule of law and is very much incompatible with the idea of even <i>trying, ever again</i> to have a policy-neutral civil service system.
Why do you consider it so outrageous that for an elected government to want a civil service bureaucracy not actively hostile to the agenda it wishes to enact? Is it not one of the much-vaunted benefits of democracy that people get to change their rulers if they wished it?
The American democracy doesn't mean "someone who gets 50% of the vote one time gets to do literally whatever they want". There is rule of law, procedural protections, etc. for very good reason. Republicans are very happy that we don't live in a dictatorship whenever Democrats are in power.
It's also important to point out that this isn't a matter of blue vs red. Trump is trying to purge the government of everyone who will say no to him *regardless of ideology* in a very unprecedented way. A lot of his targets are actually career Republicans! One of the prosecutors he just fired was a Federalist Society member who clerked for a conservative SC justice!
Trump isn't just purging Democrats, he's also purging Republicans who have a conscience and that is an EXTREMELY dangerous precedent.
This assumes Trump's premise that the civil service bureaucracy 2017-2021 *was* actively hostile to his agenda. Invalid premise. For the most part, people wanted to do their jobs and balked at being asked to break the law.
> For the most part, people wanted to do their jobs and balked at being asked to break the law.
...You are describing people being hostile to his agenda.
This contains within it the proposition that President Trump's agenda during his first term, and apparently in his own opinion during his second term, involves telling a lot of people to break the law a lot.
The implications of this proposition are interesting, to those of us who have fond memories of high school civics lessons about the rule of law, checks and balances, the role of institutional stability in a developed society, and the appropriate relationship between the citizenry of a republic and any aspiring tyrants who may arise.
Yup, and turns out nobody gives a shit. People want results, not endless bureaucracy.
Except I suspect there's a motte and bailey going on here. Musk and Trump don't really seem to believe the government should be funding science research, any more than education research or humanitarian aid. Or rather, they have no principled commitment to funding these things (I'm sure Musk will be happy to continue to funnel money to Tesla and SpaceX through his connection with Trump in classic oligarch fashion). But most people don't agree with this, so they retreat to the claim of "we are just making everything more efficient by eliminating wokeness." The easiest way to accomplish the one while pretending the other is to dismantle all of these systems and lay off all the administrators without ever building anything to replace them, and then perpetually claim that some newer, better system is around the corner until either everyone forgets or they're out of office.
> Musk and Trump don't really seem to believe the government should be funding science research
Okay, that's not true. I'm sure they support science research that benefits the military.
Given Musk's opposition to the F-35, I'm not sure Musk actually does support scientific advancements that benefit the military, in reality.
To be more precise, I am sure that Musk and Trump <i>think it desirable to have impressive, powerful, effective weapons at their disposal</i>. If you gave Trump or Musk a button he could push to make the US military be armed with unstoppable death rays and guarded by invincible force fields, he would surely push the button, at least once he'd gotten someone to trace the wiring and make sure he got paid a nice big cut of the cash costs for it.
However, given a choice between "continuing science research that benefits the military" and "ensuring their own gratification and sense of control over science, the military, and society in general," I predict that men like this will choose gratification and sense of control every time.
This is a familiar pattern we've seen with both Musk and Trump in civilian life- that they will disrupt or even break an organization under their control, rather than acknowledge that they do not have full personal power to reshape it in accordance with their whims.
This is why Pete Hegseth is now Secretary of Defense. He wasn't chosen because he's a conservative who's expected to do a good job making the military <i>materially powerful and efficient</i>. He was chosen because he's a conservative who's trusted to do exactly what Donald Trump says, and to make the military <i>aesthetically</i> 'impressive' in a manner Donald Trump understands as being desirable.
If your military is firing trans people from its cyber-security and drone-piloting and logistics branches because they're "not proper warriors" or what have you, then quite frankly, your commander in chief is not optimizing for military success. He's optimizing for a sense of control over the process.
It's not even a week of work, it's at most an hour or so of prompting an LLM!
I worry that some form of LLM prompting was what got them into this situation, so I don't trust their AI skills and am happy to let them spend the week of work.
It might be bad science, but I'd be interested to see the results if you (or Rob Miles here) spent 30 minutes getting Claude to go through the same 100 papers as you did.
I first had to convince Claude 3.5 Sonnet that it was reasonable to consider that it was ok to think about whether a proposal was woke or not. It then classified all but the last two as not woke, the second to last one as "elements focused on diversity and inclusion" but didn't want to call it woke, and the the last one as woke (but still didn't want to deny the proposal). Reasonable-ish.
ChatGPT 4o gave "Heavily Woke (DEI is a Major or Core Focus)" to the last 2, "Moderately Woke (Significant but Secondary DEI Component)" to BRAIN, and "Not Woke (Primarily Technical)" to the rest. I'm a little concerned about classifying BRAIN as Moderately Woke.
Honestly, to revoke $2B in funding it's worth just paying for human review. But if you just assign a young enough employee to classify them, it might end up being done by an LLM anyway.
>Honestly, to revoke $2B in funding it's worth just paying for human review.
Agreed. I think a person-week is an underestimate, because
a) for some of these applications it is going to take staring at them for 10 minutes, puzzling out how important the woke parts are
b) for some of the _really_ ambiguous cases, it is going to take calling the scientists and asking them exactly what they meant
but even if it is 100 person-weeks, that is still four orders of magnitude less than the funding in question.
So, here's an idea, get *two* people to review the grants. Or more. If you want to be actually *careful* rather than simply fast and cheap, though, you'd get more than one knowledgable person to review the same grant. Which, hey , is actually how science funding works.
Many Thanks! We can't, of course, simply duplicate the original review process, since that let the 10%-20% of the grants in the database that are _clearly_ Woke activism masquerading as science through. Adding multiple reviewers with _a specific mandate to find and remove Woke grants_ is indeed reasonable.
Thank you, Brinkwater, for actually trying this out, for working through the prompting necessary to convince it to do this and give it adequate direction, and for sharing your experiences with Sonnet's takes on the grant examples which Scott shared!
Did you try a non-adversarial prompt? For example, you could tell Claude you need help rating applications on a five-point scale, where five is clearly focused on progressive goals: assisting or understanding underprivileged groups, interrogating power-relations that depend on demographic characteristics, challenging normative sexualities, exclusionary linguistic practices, etc.. [Extend the rubric and gradients as needed.]
Trump cancelling Biden's AI-regulation bill also seems reflexively stupid, but it doesn't look like they were bringing LLMs to bear on USAID and the like.
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-blitzkrieg-through-the-institutions/comment/92050805
Mistaking Gaza (Africa) for Gaza (MIddle East), was that a stupid human or an AI mistake?
Not sure.
In the year 2025+, we can expect to see a strong overlap between AI mistakes and mistakes made by human beings who are either too mentally bankrupt or too indifferent to care about product quality, because one of the first things that type of human being will do when faced with a task is ask themselves "how can I get a robot to do it for me," and they will then get a robot to do it... badly."
I suspect it might be worse than that. The 0 effort thing to do is to just type "diversity minorities" or something into a search box, and blindly copy the entire list. Did they even use something as smart as a modern LLM? Or was it just grep?
Yes, regarding the mistrust of LLM prompts! Also it can give some of the about-to-be fired civil servants legit work to do so a win all round! 😀
See Appendix A on p. 39 of the report:
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092-4246-91A5-58EEF99750BC
Looks like LLMs were not used.
Also, sadly, if you look in the last page of that report, some of the phrases they were looking for ("climate research", "green new deal", "net zero", "climate change", "green energy") are unrelated to DEI.
But they're still woke, yes?
I wouldn't say so.
Ah, but Ted Cruz absolutely would call "green energy" a woke idea, which is weird because he supposedly and theoretically represents the state of Texas, which gets something close to 30% of its electricity from wind and solar energy these days.
No ACX post these days is complete without at least one comment pointing out how an LLM could make everything automagically better.
An LLM like Claude would do a much better job of classifying all 3400 grant proposals as woke or not woke and the cost would probably be under $100. Not perfect but almost certainly better than the keyword bingo they are using now
Better yet, unleash O1-pro and Deep Research on it for an hour or two. If there's a credible value prop from doing that, I'm happy to do it.
I share Scott's skepticism about their ai skills.
And conservatives themselves don't trust Llama on account of them being too woke.
If someone from the Trump admin messages me and says they'll accept it, I will just read through the grants for free and sort them into a list of woke and non-woke
From their point of view, that's pretty much what they did- they just don't know or care about the difference between "you" and "whoever they actually gave that job to." Nor do they know or care about the quality of output. The point of "anti-wokeness" in the Trump administration is not to carefully excise some kind of systemic bad idea from an otherwise respected scientific or political structure. It is to provide a justification for smashing up the entirety of the structure and reorienting it so that it (still) more efficiently funnels money to oligarchs.
If the Trump administration cared about fine distinctions in these things, they wouldn't be 'accidentally' firing air traffic controllers and nuclear weapon safety inspectors and then scrambling to rehire them when they realize the mistake.
Good.
Wokeness is a cancer.
It leads to:
> people inserted a meaningless sentence saying “this could help women and minorities” into unrelated grants, probably in the hopes of getting points with some automated filter.
Now anyone doing that will get their research funding denied. They (or someone else) can apply again after removing the cancer cells.
> JUST FUND RESEARCH TO CURE CANCER WITHOUT JUDGING IT ON WHETHER THERE IS A SENTENCE ABOUT MINORITY OUTREACH IN THE GRANT PROPOSAL!
JUST DO RESEARCH TO CURE CANCER WITHOUT BRINGING WOKENESS INTO EVERYTHING!
I'm personally happy if 20% of non-woke programmes get cancelled along with 60% (edited - 80 to 60) woke or woke-affiliated programmes.
The 20% will be more than made up in the next round with 100% of programmes that are free to focus on curing cancer, rather than 'Co-creation of affinity groups to facilitate diverse & inclusive ornithological societies'.
The 20% of non-woke programs include things like curing cancer, and the 80% of woke programs could have been found anyway if a single human had read this list before Cruz put it out.
Imagine you are a cancer researcher. Your boss says your grant will only get approved if you include the sentence "Curing cancer will help women and minorities". You think this is stupid, so you do this. The next month, you hear Ted Cruz has cancelled all of your funding. You may or may not be able to get more funding if you spend three months writing a new grant and then wait another three months for it to be considered, but by that time all of your employees will have left because you're not paying them, all of your samples will have died because you can't afford the electricity to support them, etc.
I think you should just admit they should have read the list before releasing it.
I'll admit they should have read the list before releasing it.
Would you admit that cancer research not being funded for NOT including the sentence "Curing cancer will help women and minorities" is idiotic?
Sounds like this was the default position for a long time!
Yes! I absolutely agree this was idiotic! I hope I expressed this in the post, in sentences like "It reflects poorly on the Biden administration that you could only get a grant to cure cancer if you suggested you might teach an underrepresented minority child about it."
I think releasing a list without reading it is only a minor sin, because it's just a list, but the USAID experience is that they actually act on these lists without double-checking them first, and I thought I should blog about it fast in case there was some way to impact whether they did that or not.
Fair enough! I missed that sentence.
I do think however that a one-time cancellation of funding, with the opportunity for a do-over next time in an increased pool of funding, in a way that sends a loud message that wokeness isn't tolerated...
is better than an ongoing, systemic drive to (a) fund wasteful research, (b) distort useful research with time and money required to spend on wasteful activities, each year forever.
I haven't attempted to quantify it but my gut feel is that the negative impact of the latter greatly outweighs the former.
Does that intuition match yours? Where does it differ?
On another level... you may be saying 'the overall idea is good but seriously guys, read the list first, remove the non-woke programmes, do better'.
I agree with that, but still think their actions hold positive value, and prefer an administration that moves fast and roughly in the right direction over one that moves precisely nowhere.
Of course a perfect administration would be the best of all.
> I do think however that a one-time cancellation of funding, with the opportunity for a do-over next time in an increased pool of funding, in a way that sends a loud message that wokeness isn't tolerated... is better than an ongoing, systemic drive to (a) fund wasteful research, (b) distort useful research with time and money required to spend on wasteful activities, each year forever.
In four or eight or (at most) twelve years there'll be a Democrat back in the White House, and all this hard work will be undone anyway.
> In four or eight or (at most) twelve years there'll be a Democrat back in the White House, and all this hard work will be undone anyway.
Don't be so pessimistic. There are obvious ways to prevent that, something that I'm sure the administration is very aware of...
Scott’s angle is to influence the decisions of the administration that is actually in power, whereas your angle seems to be more philosophical.
Scott endorsed Kamala, I highly doubt they care what he thinks...
According to Ted Cruz' press release, the list is 10% of the grants approved by the Biden admin.
And you found that 40% of those 10% are just throwing in buzzwords, or 4% of all grants.
So that means 90% of the grants Biden approved had neither "woke" buzzwords nor were "woke science". So it seems pretty easy to get a grant approved without throwing in something DEI-related
I feel like you're being rather misleading by leaving the actual numbers out of your conclusion
We don't know if the sample Scott selected was *representative*, but it was at least pseudo-randomly selected.
And as such, it's not entirely unreasonable to surmise that the remaining 3300+ grants might have a similar 40/20/40 split.
Even if that's not the case, we don't have sufficient evidence here to assume that 90% of the approved grants on the Sen. Cruz-announced "woke" list "had neither "woke" buzzwords nor were "woke science.""
What's amazing to me is that you care so very much that they even *might*.
"It reflects poorly on the Biden administration that you could only get a grant to cure cancer if you suggested you might teach an underrepresented minority child about it." But was that true? You've read all the cancer grants?
I wonder at the lack of historical perspective. Medical science had a long history of taking white men as the 'standard' for, say, clinical trials. This has changed drastically over past 50 years. So, what about grants whose biomedical research recognizes the importance of including subjects who are minorities, women, any group not approved by the new regime? Are they going to be called 'woke'?
I agree that a grant proposal to study ovarian cancer is targeted towards women and not men (whatever the colour of their skin).
However, that was likely to get me in trouble for ignoring non-binary folx and trans men who are somehow in some liminal state in which they are at one and the same time real men and not at all female, and yet possess female biology. But don't call them women, especially not biological women, because that's offensive.
Yeah, I'd call that wokeness.
What I'm hearing here is that English is simply not rich enough to describe the categories people want. A modest proposal: the Japanese porn industry can provide us with well established terms for making all the fine distinctions succinctly.
Futanari: woman with a penis.
Otokonoko: cis man who prefers to wear dresses + wigs.
Onabe: trans man.
etc etc
That's roughly in line with what Musk said about transparency and accountability at DOGE: he tweets about everything they did, and people can point out mistakes.
So, the intended MO for the administration is to do hasty, ill-advised BS and maybe, just maybe, walk it back if enough people raise a stink on social media? You Americans are in for a couple of nerve-wracking years, and the rest of the world as well.
It's a weird time, that's for sure. But a few weeks ago people were saying that Musk would fail like every other attempt in the last 50 years to cut back on government spending.
Trying something novel and a bit weird seems like the only option to people who actually want to see government waste exposed and cut.
“A couple of weeks ago people were saying Musk wouldn’t be able to fix up the chipped facade on the Taj Mahal, but now he’s taking a sledgehammer to it! Trying something novel and a bit weird seems necessary when you don’t know how else to do it, let’s see how it works out!
>"It reflects poorly on the Biden administration that you could only get a grant to cure cancer if you suggested you might teach an underrepresented minority child about it."
But isn't this list of 'woke grants' from the administration, already less than 10% of the total grants awarded during the relevant period?
Like, if these are the only grants that have these types of boilerplate sentences in them, then 90% of the grants awarded do not have them.
t seems very wrong to say 'you can't get a grant without these boilerplate sentences' if 90% of the grants awarded didn't have them.
I guess I see this as a shot in the war against wokeness which has some collateral damage, but has a positive return (when considering billions of wasted dollars not studying cancer, into perpetuity - talking about the explicitly woke programmes).
I hope this keeps happening. Now there's more money available to fund cancer research into perpetuity.
"collateral damage" will turn people against the cause you support.
...Why do you think the right likes any part of academia?
The moderates who the left thinks are the right still trust the science; and in fact, boomers neocons probable are still 70/30 on college
If the main bulk of the right had actually moved on from sending children to college at new higher rates year after year; we see a very different world
They did, until very recently. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-mass-defunding-of-higher-education-thats-yet-to-come
PEPFAR was created under Bush and approved by Republicans in congress as recently as December 2024. The National Endowment for Democracy was created under Regan and has a lot of Republicans on its board, including a *sitting Republican senator*. And so on.
The amount of monstrous stuff people will do to bystanders and just shrug off as "collateral damage" is amazing. All the while claiming that this is being done to free those bystanders from the previous set of half-assed ruled.
For a lot of people the only objection to a boot stomping on a human face is that the boot isn't on their foot.
It seems like this is just the same failure mode as what you're complaining about - if we should just fund science on its merits rather than whether it phrases itself in a way that aligns with the administration's culture-war positions, it's equally bad to raise or lower the odds for somebody including or excluding a couple random culture-war sentences.
This assumes they didn't really mean the "random culture-war sentences," and only included them because they were forced to. This is probably true of most of them, but how does one distinguish them from those who meant them, and WERE planning to spend a significant portion of their funding on such activities?
And leaving aside the question of past grant applications, it definitely applies going forward. Not woke people who didn't want to stick their head above the turret probably cowardly added these sentences to their applications. They shouldn't have, but they did.
But now they have no reason to. If they still do, that's really on them.
Well, I imagine that would come up in their grant applications somewhere.
But also how much is that really a justified concern? How much research do we need to scour just to make sure nobody tries to do something too progressive?
*Which* activities are you so deathly offended by? Encouraging a diversity of smart young people to become scientists? The horror.
Simple. Do what Scott did. Read the damn thing! Does it look like run-of-the-mill basic research with a shibboleth tacked on to pass a stupid requirement, or does it look substantially woke? The method may not be 100% accurate, but it's a lot better than not even reading it!
I think a crude measure of distinguishing "who really meant them" are the proposals about studying Blackness or queerness or "feminist glaciers". Those can probably be dumped on the "are you kidding me" pile.
Things like "working on brain injuries or cancer research, oh yeah and mustn't forget women'n'minorities" can probably go on the "okay fine" pile.
You could try actually reading the proposal.
Well.... not at all. If people write in their grant application that they want to build tunnels more efficiently to teach Hamas how to kill more Jews, that is a bad thing - I don't want to fund that grant. If they say they want to make them cheaper that is not "the opposite culture war position".
Racial discrimination is illegal. If people talk in their grant application about how they want to implicitly use it for some racially discriminative end, that's bad. Penalising those who do, and not penalising those who don't, *is* funding on the merits. The thing you shouldn't do - which I'm not aware of anyone serious advocating for - is favouring applications which promise to discriminate against minorities.
Uh... okay? My point is that "get rid of grant applications with some woke language in them" seems like the same failure mode as "only fund grant applications with woke language in them", not that I think anybody is literally in favor of pro-racism grant proposals.
>Racial discrimination is illegal.
Only technically! Selective enforcement and prosecutorial discretion are a helluva drug.
I’m sort of vaguely amused by your implicit assertion that those dollars will now go towards curing cancer, because I have seen to sense of an agenda of how to accomplish that, rather than some different buzzword system for earning grant money or simply returning it to the wealthy who would only donate a small portion of that amount to cancer-curing institutions.
I don't understand why they couldn't have taken the 34 hours, cancelled the actually woke ones, and sent the nonwoke ones a letter saying "In the future, you don't need to include a sentence about outreach to minorities".
I don't think the best way to stop wasting billions of dollars, or fund cancer research, is to in fact ruin billions of dollars worth of good science including cancer research for no reason (or, charitably, because you don't like one meaningless sentence in their proposal).
I feel like this is the same discussion we had from the other direction ten years ago. People were saying "Well I don't care if some good researcher is collateral damage in the war on racism! And besides, he included one racist-sounding sentence in his proposal, so he deserves it!" I think we will constantly be going back and forth on this horrible pendulum until people stop gleefully celebrating all of the "collateral damage" that their ideology causes.
> you don't need to include a sentence about outreach to minorities
But that isn't what the message they want to convey. It's more "Thou shalt not include such a sentence." This is a more effective way of doing that.
Nobody would include that sentence if it hadn't previously been required! They can just let everyone know they're removing the requirement! They don't have to also burn a billion dollars and a thousand science careers!
So, uh...you're not going to make an argument that the increased message effectiveness is WORTH the collateral damage? You're taking it for granted that message effectiveness is so much more important than collateral damage that there's no serious chance that avoiding collateral damage could ever be the better side of the trade-off?
Why would you want to convey that message? Why should you care if someone includes a sentence saying that a black person might read something if you fund this grant? Are you so focused on the political implications that you’d rather restrict science to fit your politics?
Can we agree on "don't include this sentence unless you really are doing research on a problem that mainly or solely affects black women/Native Americans/one-legged penguins"?
I"m pretty sure there's a vengeful element here influencing most people who are in favor of just sticking with this dumb system of sorting grants. "Good! Fuck those people who stuck in token woke sentences and so in a tiny way contributed to the maintenance of the woke era., They were complicit."
Betcha every one of you has gone along with some nonsense requirement without complaint at school or at work. Once you start tuning out info like that about yourself in order to more wholeheartedly despise something understandable another person did, you are no longer thinking about fairness and justice, you're just diddling your indignation center.
Yes, I think you are right about at least some of the motivation.
Weirdly, in 2020 I wrote in Maximilien Robespierre as my protest write-in candidate. And the _other_ plausible motive for such a crude system is to recreate something like the Terror... ( fortunately, no guillotines this time... )
> Betcha every one of you has gone along with some nonsense requirement without complaint at school or at work.
If I hadnt may I cast the first stone?
"I think we will constantly be going back and forth on this horrible pendulum until people stop gleefully celebrating all of the "collateral damage" that their ideology causes."
I have to agree unhappily here. Never thought I'd be nostalgic for the 90s but I'd go back to the days of Captain Planet and neon coloured clothing just to avoid the excesses of "you said X/well you said Y first" today.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
We don't know if there's an example of that happening.
Others have touched on this, but why in the world would it take 3 months to delete a single line from an application document and resubmit it?
Also, why would you assume they'll cancel all the grants? This seems a very long bow, given that a substantial share of them seem to have completed (there is a field "Performance End Date" and almost half are already passed) - seems hard to cancel a grant for an already finished project/expenditure. Perhaps I missed it, but the link doesn't say "we'll cancel all these". Instead it explicitly says "Chairman Cruz has requested significant scrutiny of awards listed in the database." Which is indicative of the contrary.
To the extent that some not-yet-conducted grants are cancelled, and people have to reapply, the funding won't have been used, so it's hardly a complete waste either.
So what is the action plan for an award that has been 'completed' but now fails Cruz's 'scrutiny' . Claw back money from.....?
No idea? Might be nothing. Certainly can't get *that* money back. There are things they could try? Mostly I imagine "stop it happening again".
Aren’t most of these grants that have started being funded but not completed? “pausing” it for six months now is effectively throwing away the money you’ve already spent, and making them waste time while you approve them to start over and hire new people now that the old ones all left to get a new job because their funding was “paused”.
There are two date fields in the document. The "end date" has passed in close to half of them, and growing by the day. I am not entirely sure what the end date means in practice - the legit end date on the project, the date by which the money will have been spent, etc. In general I would imagine that the money is full spent prior to the end date most of the time. (It is also possible that the "end date" is some meaningless date that people stick on a form at the start, and has no effect once the money is granted, in which case we'd be guessing even more).
Depending on what the study involves, it's also totally not true that "“pausing” it for six months now is effectively throwing away the money you’ve already spent". If the funding was to buy lab equipment, well, that's already paid for. It'll still be there 6 months later. (And of course you can continue - the grant is paused, no-one says you can't keep doing research). If you've bought a dataset, it's still bought. Often these grants are in effect a slush fund - the dirty secret of these things is that there is, fwiu and consistent with my anecdotal experience, essentially zero enforcement mechanism that you spend the money on what you say you'll spend it on, and often it ends up being a generic slush fund to pay for RAs and/or buy out teaching time. (You probably at some point do the research you talked about in your grant, but no-one verifies that the $s from grant X are spent on project X and often they are not).
And then there's stuff like the wonderful, deep and insightful "feminist glaciology" paper, (funded by you, Mr and Mrs Taxpayer, NSF Grant #1253779) where among many appropriate questions one surely is "why did this require grant money in the first place?"
In most cases, most of the money is spent on hiring people (mainly grad students and post docs). “Pausing” that spending means firing those people until funds are available again, then maybe trying to hire them back if they haven’t moved on to something else in the meantime so that you need to put out a new ad and go through a new process.
This is an extremely field-specific claim/assumption. (I would rather hope that grants for projects in physics labs are disproportionately unlikely to be infiltrated with woke nonsense). Plus, as people like to say, money is fungible, people often have access to multiple pots and can switch between things.
You can keep on whinging (and complaining about pushback against ideological corruption of science that you seemingly had no problem with, all you can complain about is the pushback) but for all the hyperbole this is likely going to only affect a sliver of a sliver of grants.
> Also, why would you assume they'll cancel all the grants?
Because they've already canceled most scientific research and keep talking about how much they want to do so? Also, just look at what happened to USAID.
It's not a secret that Musk is taking a "kill them all and let god sort it out" approach to government. He's openly bragging about it!
>I think you should just admit they should have read the list before releasing it.
Is the literacy rate among politicians dropping precipitously? Biden('s admin) didn't read that ACLU pardon list either!
I'm pretty easy to convince that yes, politicians are basically illiterate.
It’s even worse than this. The time to funding is more like 6-12 months and the chance of getting funded is ~10%. Losing a grant on a project is an effective way to kill it completely.
BTW, I am a professor with NSF funding and my grant is on this list. My grant is to study how polymers (specifically polyethylene) crystallize.
Uh...weren't the numbers: 40% woke, 20% borderline, 40% nonwoke? Where are you getting 80% woke or woke affiliated?
Thanks... writing too quick. Edited.
If I offered a bet that a year from now, grant proposals will only be considered if they contain a token sentence on how the research will strengthen America's position in the world, would you bet against it?
And perhaps more importantly, they should make sure to use a euphemism if they want to suggest they might be talking about individuals who aren’t straight white men.
Hey, maybe you could just assume that the grant-writers aren't going to discriminate instead of requiring them to put in writing HERE, EXACTLY, ARE THE WAYS IN WHICH WE WILL FURTHER RACISM AND SEXISM.
I wouldn’t doubt it at all and this would be equally stupid.
The thing I think you are missing is that these grants are primary funding for many institutions and programs, beyond the research that they fund. Thus institutional goals must creep into the grant-giving process because that process controls institutional funding.
This is itself a terrible state of affairs, it would be great if there were grants for research only and grants for institutional goals and those were separate pipelines. But to get that you'd need to reform everything about the process at a much more fundamental level. Trying to pretend the system works that way when it doesn't is just going to produce bad policy.
How much would you bet that overall funding for actually productive research will increase under the Trump administration? I have extremely low expectations and frankly struggle to imagine the mind of someone who believes that this administration will be beneficial for science. If I'm really honest, I'm not even sure how someone can simultaneously hold generally favorable views of both science (i.e. the empirical study of the natural world, not necessarily actually existing scientific institutions) and Republicans.
It's like this guy didn't even read anything Scott actually wrote.
Ahh, that was cathartic, I'm going to go ahead and report my own comment now.
Checked - it was true and necessary, 2 out of 3.
Ha - I’m amused - at your post, and the thought that someone who holds a contrary opinion to you is maybe a bot.
Cancelling woke research frees up more funding to cure cancer, and is better overall.
Hi Random, thanks for reading!
I don't give a shit what you think.
👍
Are you ok?
Ehhh, been better been worse
Banned for one day for this comment.
Ok but let’s look at this from the perspective of someone who’s not really invested in the culture war and wokeness and would just like to get some really high quality research to understand the world and save lives.
Under the “woke Biden world”, some researchers throw in a line about helping minorities and a tiny percentage of researchers get money for some woke research we don’t understand the point of.
Under the “anti-woke Cruz world”, we threaten really good basic research potentially improving/saving millions of lives.
Like it really seems the second world is much more worrying and is more “cancer”. (Like literally could cause more actual cancer)
Not sure why this is worse than the Biden admin passing over grant applications that don’t have woke sentences in them. Especially since we know that this practice affected a lot more than grant applications including jobs, university placements e.g. diversity statements.
This seems like a bit of laziness that could be fixed by someone influential informing Cruz about the mistake unlike the previous status-quo which enforced the expression of left wing views if you wanted a job in academia.
"unlike the previous status-quo which enforced the expression of left wing views if you wanted a job in academia."
Nitpick: That isn't the previous status quo. That's the current status quo. Diversity statements are still prevalent in faculty job applications.
Are they? There's been a lot of high-profile removals of that requirement.
He stated pretty clearly that it was bad and dumb that the Biden administration was forcing these inclusions. That doesn't make this better. That just means that they had an incredibly low bar for being better than the previous admin and they _still failed to do so_.
"It's dumb and bad but also you can't do anything about it" is tea so weak it's been distilled for purity.
Good thing you are entirely making up that second part. We absolutely could and should be doing things about it. But "It's dumb and bad so you should do literally anything, including other dumb and bad things", is not a great response. Why not do good solutions instead?
Other people have pointed out that these sentences and genuflections are part of the broader impacts requirements of grant funding (and, as such, have mostly existed since long before Biden). Get rid of broader impacts requirements (which are generally just fancy wording for trying to inject this bullshit into science), and these kinds of stupid sentences go away, and you _don't_ have to throw out large amounts of real and useful science.
It took me literally 30 seconds to come up with a better idea than this whole stupid virtue/vice signalling theater. And it's not even that good of an idea! I'm sure there are many, many better ones! The fact that Cruz' office was not able to come up with any of them is a staggeringly horrible indictment.
You clearly like where his hear is at, so you should be even more annoyed than I am. Demand better. Don't be satisfied with this swill.
"Not sure why this is worse than the Biden admin passing over grant applications that don’t have woke sentences in them. "
Pardon my ignorance, but is this a documented thing, or just internet speculation?
They're talking about "broader impacts" sections, which have been required for NSF applications (and resented by researchers) for decades. That can mean anything from "national security" to "increased economic competitiveness" to "increased well-being" to, yes, "participation of underrepresented minorities in STEM".
Thanks. And that's pretty much what I expected: I didn't pay *too* much attention to the news out of the States during the Biden era, but I expect the explosion of conservative outrage if Biden has done what people are insinuating would have been pretty hard to miss.
Exactly. And NSF is a small fish in every way compared to NIH, and the DoE, and the DoD, the other big funders of science in the USA, which I'm sure most of the chuds applauding these moves are clueless about. The idea that all required all grants to have a 'woke' rider is nonsense.
I think this is what's bothering me about this whole debate. "National security" can refer (in for example DoD) grants either to actions that support Ukraine (and thus strengthen NATO) or actions that support Israel (an ally, but also possibly lead to deaths in Gaza). We can disagree about which side we support in either of these cases, but the laudable goal of improving national security doesn't itself bother us. "Increased economic competitiveness" *can* mean in polluting industries or in sustainable industries, but the phrase itself is laudable, no problem with it. "increased well-being" of ... whom exactly? Don't worry about it, no problem. These are all seen, somehow, as apolitical. But suddenly research that promises to specifically benefit underrepresented minorities is A) outside the legitimate scientific scope and B) woke and therefore bullshit, and C) automatically divisive.
I don't think "apolitical" is quite the right framing. The new right does not seem willing to acknowledge a distinct public sphere at all - it's just war for them, top to bottom. (No doubt someone will be along eventually to argue that the shitlibs did it first, thereby illustrating my point.)
Some statement to the effect of the general value of your research beyond the narrow topic it is focused on is indeed required. But this requirement is ancient and has absolutely nothing to do with Biden. I can't say I know when these statements began, but they have been common my entire scientific career, since the GWB administration
Thanks! I appreciate the info.
I don't want to defend any evaluators who gave preferential treatment to research projects just for making woke noises, but I do think that canceling research that is already in progress is worse than refusing to fund it in the first place. Canceling is more wasteful than avoiding, and a hypothetical equilibrium where both parties cancel each others' ongoing research whenever power changes hands is much worse than a hypothetical equilibrium where both parties merely change where NEW funding goes while in power.
>Not sure why this is worse than the Biden admin passing over grant applications that don’t have woke sentences in them.
These 'woke' grants that the administration singled out for having 'woke sentences,' are less than 10% of teh grants awarded during that period.
So, 90% of the grants awarded did *not* have any 'woke sentences'.
Meaning they certainly weren't required to get selected.
The total FY 2024 funding was $11.314 billion. All these put together was $2.05 billion. I have no idea if this is including future outlays to the point that it would be better to compare it to 2024+2025 FY, or whatever, but presumably it is reasonable to use FY 2024 as a lower bound on the total funding these grants are part of. So, at a reasonable assumption only ~7% (40% of ~18%) felt the need to add dumb stuff, which is a plausible-enough number even if the Biden administration was actually wokeness-neutral and this was just rumors/superstition. If it was actually a controlling factor then I would expect ~every single grant to look like this.
This has been in place since the 1980s. It's not Biden related. Silly? Maybe. But it's pretty clear here that this is taking a flamethrower to a dandelion.
Aside from the sheer incompetence described above: it's worse because it's a sucker-punch.
Yes, it's stupid to reject an application because it doesn't have a boilerplate statement about being woke. Just as it's stupid to reject it because it DOES have such a statement. But that's not what they're doing. They're applying a new rule that didn't exist last week, and they're doing it retroactively.
The left-wing equivalent would be if Biden, on entering office, had cancelled any existing projects that didn't have a sentence about supporting minorities in the original brief.
I worry you might be being much too generous with the assumption that the administration or their supporters have made mistakes here. Painting stuff with a broad brush suits political goals like:
1. Justifying themselves to the public
2. Justifying themselves to the hardcore online base
3. Enjoyably persecuting an enemy group (basically all scientists vote for Democrats).
4. Serving the interests of that section of their coalition which essentially wants no public money for science.
Accuracy matters little.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the reason Ted Cruz put out this sloppy list is so it will get cited a hundred times along with the words "over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion in federal funding" on the comfortable assumption that very few people will read any of these. Just like the list of woke USAID projects.
I think the cynical view here may be more accurate. But I still think it's good to write things of the form "Alice claimed to be doing X, but she actually did Y, and it should not be hard to actually do X", even if you think Alice did Y on purpose.
"While I cannot take time to list all the woke grants awarded by the National Science Foundation, I have in my hand a database of 3400..."
For the woke example of the grants to encourage Native Americans to go into STEM fields - the grant even says the institutions are tribal colleges. Which are colleges run by Native American tribes. Who attends tribal colleges? 99% or more are tribal members. In other words… wait for it… Native Americans. What were they supposed to do, not say? Yikes.
This is a useful list though. That one sentence people thought would help, having the opposite effect.
I mean the non-woke thing would be to not have tribal colleges in the first place.
But that would be preventing the establishment of an educational institution based on identity factors. It’s a trap!
Would it? I could have sworn I'd heard people--quite a number of people, especially here--insist that "wokeness" was a recent phenomenon and that any claims to tie it to previous social movements were fake and disingenuous.
Seriously? Tribal colleges are the main educational opportunities available for Native Americans on tribal land. If they didn't exist many students would have no higher education within a practical commuting distance. You'd rather they never were formed and Native Americans not go to college?
Also, even if you don't like it, tribal governments also are legally independent and have the right to do the same things that states can do. Should we get rid of all state universities like UCLA?
Maybe you are making the unwarranted assumption that only Native Americans can enroll? That is incorrect, they are typically open to all, but since they are on tribal land they typically serve primarily Native Americans.
There shouldn't be "tribal lands" or "tribes" for that matter. The idea of special privileges or chunks of land belonging to members of certain groups by virtue of their ancestors having been a special race is straight-up racism, it should have been chucked out along with slavery and DEI.
I'm not sure I understand your preferred environment. Back in the 19th century, the US government entered into agreements with established tribes to recognize the authority and limited sovereignty of those tribes in some defined geographical areas. Should the government have refused to make those agreements?
If so, should the government have tried to compel all Indians to live in towns, and continued war against tribes who refused? Should the government have made those agreements, and then cancelled them when they became "politically incorrect"?
Under what circumstances should the government uproot existing legal frameworks, and what process should be followed in doing so?
> Should the government have refused to make those agreements?
Absolutely.
> If so, should the government have tried to compel all Indians to live in towns, and continued war against tribes who refused?
No, they should be free to live wherever they like, just like any other US citizen. The US Government could even have granted land to individuals; instead of declaring the "Navajo Reservation" belonging to the "Navajo Tribe", they could have divvied up that territory into individual allotments and granted each member of that tribe at the time an equally sized lot (by some lottery scheme I guess since not all blocks are equally desirable). The land would be full freehold, equally sellable to anyone.
But that way it would be freehold land owned by individuals under the laws of the USA and the underlying states, not some weird arrangement where the land has some make-believe sovereignty assigned to some weird pseudo-racial group and yet nobody in particular owns it so it doesn't get used for anything useful.
We have similar problems in Australia. The 4000 Pitjantjatjara people collectively own a chunk of land the size of South Korea, which should make them rich as fuck (even if it's not the best land). But they can't do anything useful with it because it belongs somehow to "all of them" in some pseudo-Communist approach. If the land were divided equally and every one of them got 25 square kilometres of desert to use or farm or sell as they see fit, it would be a lot better for everybody.
I'm not sure how you got where you are in Australia, but the US government wasn't strong enough to impose its will on all the Indians living west of the Mississippi River in the late 19th century. At the same time, they wanted to allow settlers to move into the areas where these tribes lived. In the 1870s and 1880s, I think most Indians' attitude was "We have rights to the lands where we hunt - you have no right to sell it to farmers who want to move in. As long as you keep the farmers out, there will be no trouble."
The solution arrived at was to negotiate with the tribes to allow settlers in some areas while reserving other areas for Indians to live as they wanted. Given that these agreements were made (and often violated), most people think the government should honor its commitments.
I think you're right that the tribal members would be better served by allowing more private ownership of land on the reservations, which generally isn't allowed. Dissolving the tribes and treating all US citizens as "only" US citizens probably appeals to cosmopolitan educated individualists, but I'm not sure that's a reason to impose it.
In the US, tribal members are free to leave the reservations and live as normal citizens in towns and cities, buying and selling land, working as employees or building businesses, or doing anything else citizens do. In some sense they'd be better off materially if they did so, but maintaining tribal ties is important to many, and maintaining tribal sovereignty is an important thing to them.
It would be a lot better for land speculators. I'll forgive you for not knowing much about Native American history, but that was actually tried. It was called the Dawes Act of 1887, and it was probably the most harmful piece of legislation since the Indian Removal Act.
Turns out if you tell people with centuries-old traditions of communal land use that they now "own" small plots of land, on which they are currently living in poverty, but don't give them access to development capital or anything else they might need to succeed, they tend to sell those small plots to land speculators and buy food and clothing so they can survive.
Ok what if Trump tries your approach, but then the Supreme Court reiterates like in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGirt_v._Oklahoma that the government must follow the commitments it made in treaties with Indian tribes (which is like 99% what would happen in reality). Would you support ignoring the courts or having some tribal lands with tribal colleges.
And even if you think courts and the rule of law is dumb are you at least sympathetic to other people thinking “yeah we should not overthrow the judiciary and honor treaties and it seems like supporting tribal colleges is pretty good at educating this otherwise underserved population that Purdue University probably isn’t expanding too soon”
I was going to make a similar comment to Brian. Clearly you are not aware of the legal status of Native American nations and how that differs from other USA minority groups. The US government has treaties and cannot and could not just "chuck them out" even if we don't like them now. There are controversies over how tribal membership is defined, but that doesn't change the fact that enrolled tribal members are citizens of their tribe and have rights and entitlements that pertain to them due to that status that were established by treaties with the US government. If we want to make changes now, they would need to be renegotiated just like we would with any other sovereign entity.
> The US government has treaties and cannot and could not just "chuck them out" even if we don't like them now.
Uh... yes we can. What's the treaty going to, defend itself with a knife? If the constitution doesn't matter, neither do these treaties.
OK, can vs should. Yes, the currently administration can try to do a lot of things that break the constitution, treaties, laws, etc. It is still unclear whether they will get away with it. I hope they don't.
For "should", I believe that ultimately the rule of law is an important principle and that breaking treaties is wrong, and until the most recent administration the country was also largely governed in this way regardless of political party. The rapid erosion of this social norm is staggering.
Federally recognized tribes are autonomous political entities with their own citizenship laws: however you feel about blood quantum rules (which are very controversial and not in use by all tribes) they're no worse than the more restrictive sorts of jus sanguinis.
Tribes were nations that the US government signed binding agreements with.
Should we also eliminate state universities because the idea that certain chunks of land belong to certain states is straight up jingoism? We should chuck out all non-universal governments along with slavery and D.E.I.
Okay, fine, there shouldn't be tribes or reservations or anything. I'll go with that.
Now, how do we fix it?
One way is to gradually dismantle the old institutions and while making sure that the people who rely on them can either use the existing good institutions or new institutions you create.
Another way is to whip out your dick and just start spraying at people who were relying on the old system because they weren't smart enough to predict your mental model of what would be moral.
" The idea of special privileges or chunks of land belonging to members of certain groups by virtue of their ancestors having been a special race is straight-up racism"
Reading this, I must suspect you of never having learned ANY 18th or 19th century U.S. history. That is NOT what tribal lands are or why they were established. Just for you, an abbreviated summary of the relevant bits of North American history:
1. Between 4 and 5 centuries ago, various European groups started setting the Americas. This caused some issues because the Americas already HAD lots of people living there. Sometimes they would establish friendly relationships and trade with these people. Other times they would murder them in order to take their land. Sometimes they would spread diseases to them accidentally. Other times they would spread diseases to them deliberately. A couple hundred years of this resulted in a dense concentration of European settlements along the East Coast of North America.
2. Eventually, a group of those settlements broke off from their home country of Britain and formed a new nation.
3. Over the years, that nation kept expanding westward and southward. This still caused some issues because much of the continent was still inhabited by people who weren't part of this nation, and weren't of European descent.
4. Not to be bothered by this, the colonists would threaten and often murder the inhabitants of any land they wanted so they could take it for themselves. When the displaces peoples would retaliate (or their neighbors would, believing--correctly as it turned out--that they would be next) the colonists would murder more of them.
5. This gradual but fairly continual spree of murder and theft didn't *quite* extend so far as deliberately wiping out all of the people the colonists were displacing. But of course, neither were the colonists particularly interested in having any of these people living on the *same* lands as them, because ew, no, clearly they can't do that. But being as they were (quite clearly, even to themselves) gradually heading towards occupying a large contiguous chunk of the continent, this created a conundrum. Where *should* these people-whose-land-they-were-entitled-to live?
6. The solution to this conundrum that largely won out is a policy of what would today be called "ethnic cleansing;" the previous inhabitants were removed en masse from all the land the colonists wanted. Of course, a lot of that was still done by means of murder, but some small patches of marginal land (chosen by the colonists, of course) were set aside so to allow for the less-murderous sort of ethnic cleansing where you merely force people off their land at gunpoint.
7. Fancying itself a nation of laws, the growing nation would often write down its policies towards those pieces of marginal land and their inhabitants in the form of laws or treaties. But despite the fiction of being bilateral, of course it didn't feel compelled to *keep* those polices: what a silly notion. So these patches of land sort of ended up with a status of being "self governing, except when we decide otherwise."
8. Eventually, long after this was all crystalized, some silly people started to *slowly*, *gradually* adopt the notion that a nation of laws maybe *ought* to generally stick to its laws and treaties, even in cases where it was powerful enough to break them with impunity. Though even then, it's not like they remained perfectly inviolate.
So you see, the idea that tribal lands are "special privileges or chunks of land belonging to members of certain groups by virtue of their ancestors having been a special race" is WILDLY a-historical. Unless you consider "living where we tell you in exchange for not being murdered" a "special privilege" in which case I'm not sure we have any way to communicate with one another. And the idea that these lands having this status and history is a "woke" idea is...well, let's just say I'm glad that people are so generous in offering evidence to my assertion that "woke" is a pretty meaningless word.
The status of these lands in nothing more or less than the mess the ancestors of the current U.S. polity left them with. If their ancestors had been more murderous there would be no tribal lands because there would be nobody to inhabit them. If they'd been less racist, native communities would have been integrated (forcibly, mind you) into the nation as it grew. If they'd been *less* rapacious the current U.S. would be much smaller and it would share a continent with several other nations. But none of that is changeable without a time machine. One could, of course, advance various coercive policies to change the current status quo to a different one: forcibly integrating these peoples NOW or something like that. But doing that because of a complaint that the current status quo is, uh "straight-up racism" would be...I'm not sure "hypocrisy" is a strong enough term.
"The idea of special privileges or chunks of land belonging to members of certain groups by virtue of their ancestors having been a special race "
I should note here that I'm a bit biased, since *I too* was born with special privileges and chunks of land--much bigger and better chunks than any native reservation--by virtue of the identity of my ancestors. The term for it is "U.S. citizenship." Honest question, would you consider that scheme racist? If so, what would your preferred alternative be?
(And yes, I do mean "honest question." I'm quite open to the notion that people shouldn't be given special privileges due to their circumstances of birth, as long as it's applied evenhandedly.)
Given that tribal reservations are the territory of sovereign groups, why should they not have tribal colleges? I assume you have no objection to state colleges; why should tribes not be allowed to establish colleges for their members?
even some municipalities (notably, NYC) fund public colleges! In some hypothetical situation where tribal status was completely abolished, there would still be a bunch of municipalities in the middle of nowhere, often speaking minority languages, and whose people would benefit from public education...
If you are at a Jewish college and are writing a grant proposal, will you stress how it will get more Jews into STEM fields?
You might well stress that it is a way to get devoutly religious people from non-college background into STEM.
If we lived in a world where Jews were really under represented in STEM, that seems sensible.
A related example: ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel don’t tend to get secular degrees, so the Israeli government might try a grant to get more ultra-orthodox Jews to finish college degrees. https://www.timesofisrael.com/state-watchdog-gives-haredi-colleges-failing-grade-over-sky-high-dropout-rates/amp/
I used to work on auto-tagging systems at the World Bank. There were often “hot topics” people felt obligated to wedge into their reports, so one of the purposes of what we were doing was to tease out papers that were actually about “gender” or “green energy” from all the ones that just tossed the phrase in there to score points or check boxes. Everyone knew this was a thing people tended to do, not maliciously but to make their work sound more impactful by pointing out relatively minor effects. This was fifteen years ago.
I don’t really expect rigor from people generating lists like this, or expect them to care about the end product being accurate since that probably wasn’t the point and they’re immune to embarrassment. I’m just pointing out that if you did want to build a better list like this, you could probably do it a lot faster and easier than I did with some combination of existing vocabularies and AI.
In all the DOGE discourse, a line I've been hearing quite often is "while there's certainly a lot of inefficiency and waste in the Government, the executive branch isn't allowed to cut the budget for anything, only the legislature can do that".
I'm not sure if that's actually true or not, constitutionally, but if it is then it's insane. Why? Because if you rely on the legislature to figure out what budgets should be cut, then this is the quality of work that they come up with. The Legislative branch has a small number of staff. Half of them are lawyers, and the other half are secretaries. They don't have the resources to make sensible decisions about what should and shouldn't be cut, so the best they're going to come up with is some kind of bullshit find-the-keywords list like this.
I don't think Ted Cruz's staff are particularly incompetent by Congressional staff standards, I just think that this is the best you're likely to get.
So, the actual answer is much more complicated than anyone is pretending. But generally, there's two different things that are getting conflated. First there's stuff like the existence of departments, their missions and funding. The executive doesn't just get to decide 'eh, nah, let's not have an SEC,' when congress created it and provides it ongoing funding.
But, for specific things, the question of how to go about them is usually within the discretion of the executive. And especially for something like a grant program, the usual way it works is that congress appropriates X dollars for grants for some general purpose and then the agency has rules for how it will evaluate those grants and discretion in how to create those rules and which grants to fund (and, usually authority to cancel grants under some circumstances).
But, since there are usually outside parties relying on funds which have been granted/guaranteed, there's requirements that have to be followed before termination, outside fairly rare circumstances/emergencies.
Now, if Congress thinks a grant program is bad, or wants some specific thing to be barred, they can simply either not fund it next year (remember, most funding is happening on a yearly basis for ongoing programs, so they've got lots of bites at the apple for this and are already making a decision, every year, to fund it or not) or pass specific legislation adjusting what the rules for the grants are.
Note, I am not a grants officer, none of this is legal advice, just a general description of what's going on.
In addition to what EC-2021 said, deciding what the budget gets spent on is and always has been a huge part of Congress's job. If Congress doesn't have enough of the right kind of staff to do this job adequately, then one of the first things they should be spending money on is more staff.
I think the evidence so far points to DOGE not being any better. And I say that as someone whose first knee-jerk response to your comment was to think that if the budget is so large and complex that congress can't manage it, then it should be reduced until they can. So I'm very onboard with the idea that the federal government does (and there fore pays for/budgets) _far_ too many things.
I just don't buy the idea that the executive branch will do any better.
Why not? Technocrat liberals have been beating the drum about how great it would be to have well-funded professional staffers, but the problem is ideological: politicians don’t want to look like exemplars of government overspending.
A competent and well-funded legislature should absolutely be able to do most of the work, and to provide oversight where needed. It’s only the current zeitgeist that shuts it down.
Which politicians? I don't think the Dems have ever been accused of excessive concern for slimming down government.
More accurately: it’s a losing issue for Democrats optically so they don’t fight it very hard when Republicans come after it.
Funding Congressional staff specifically is probably unpopular for the same reason that Congress voting themselves a pay raise is unpopular - it looks like self-dealing even if you actually do need the money!
(And the Congressional Research Service is pretty obscure so it's hard to make the case for how important it is for Congress.)
Counterpoint, Elon Musk has pretty much unlimited access to Federal government expertise and the ability to hire any staff he could possibly want, and he's still apparently responding to random things people on Twitter misidentify in publicly-available data. So it's not like it's a slam-dunk in that direction either.
Yeah, Elon's not stupid, so there's no way he's not being deliberately obtuse here.
With that said, I won't shed a tear for the Department of Education. The most charitable interpretation I can find for their budget allocation is that it was fuelling credential inflation.
I personally think it's fair to say Musk has been spending way too much time on Twitter and it's gotten to him.
It's not untrue to say that there's a lot of pointless and/or ideologically nefarious spending in the budgets of western governments, and it's true that a lot of the senior management in these institutions were doing an end-run around executive mandates, and it's also true that we can't go through another half-century of taxes being cut while the welfare state continues to balloon and our kids are indoctrinated into hating their own cultures.
Something like this had to happen. I just wish the cuts and firings were a bit more surgical in various areas.
(Admittedly, the left is correct that raising taxes on the top 1-10% is probably overdue and the economic gains of this group over the past half-century can't be explained purely as a function of IQ diffs. But we don't always get to pick our policies from a menu.)
The only thing that we could realistically cut to balance the budget are Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and defense spending. The NSF is not a meaningful cost-saving target, AND the benefits of scientific research on economic growth may well make it, in aggregate, a negative saving.
Inflation-adjusted public education spending in the US has expanded by at least a factor of 4x since the 1970s, with marginal returns in terms of reading, math or science literacy, so I imagine there's quite a bit of room for trimming the fat here.
There's also no correlation between hours of schoolwork and PISA scores within the developed world, and no correlation between health spending and health outcomes. Which suggests that outcomes here are mainly driven by genetic and lifestyle factors external to the health and education systems.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2019/11/07/a-tale-of-two-covariates-why-owid-and-company-are-wrong-about-us-healthcare/
Conservatives sometimes point out that the cost of *elective* surgeries have plummetted relative to the costs of public healthcare over the past 40 years or so (I think I watched a Larry Elder video on the topic at some point), so it's entirely possible that taking an axe to the OECD's health sector and just funding a basic income so people can just pay for their own doctors would greatly improve health services on net. But I'll admit to not having deep expertise on the subject.
I think you are drastically overestimating Elon
This is part of the problem with America's system of government. The soft fusion of executive and legislative power that exists in most(?) other first world countries- Australia, UK, New Zealand, Germany, etc. is much preferable for many reasons, one of them is that reviewing extremely complex budgets and putting them through the legislature works best if the dominant faction in the legislature is in control of the executive, and hence the public service and thus can review this stuff and has the capacity for institutional governance and design.
The other good reason not to separate them is so that the public *KNOW WHO TO BLAME WHEN STUFF ISN'T GOING WELL*. In a strongly adversarial system, the party that doesn't hold executive power has an incentive to block everything and create the impression that nothing is going well- thus encouraging low-information voters to vote for the party out of power, rewarding them for their intransigence.
The separation of executive and legislature is a disaster that unfortunately happened to be a trendy idea at just the wrong point in history.
I occasionally see analogous arguments for "just have a monarchy, at least you can storm the palace when the king fucks up", but last I checked storming the palace didn't work out so hot for MAGA (or in Tianenmen Square), so I'm pretty skeptical about this approach.
I also don't see a ton of evidence that the underlying social problems here are less pronounced or were responded to in a more timely fashion in the UK or Germany.
In fact, the US has been massively more successful than Europe or anywhere else in the world. Which is why it's such a big deal that Trump and Musk are trying to fuck it all up in a way that no past president of either party has contemplated.
I think much of the Trump/Vance/Musk agenda is both urgently needed and entirely justified in terms of democratic mandate, I just get annoyed when people put forward certain autocratic/monopartisan governments as supposedly superior alternatives to division of powers.
At the same time, one should be cautious about attributing US success to it's system of government (Liberia has a virtually identical written constitution, for example.) I think the main reason why the US is wealthier than other western countries is brain drain, followed by geographic factors, and neither of those actually scales at a global level.
I agree that the US's success is not due to paper. It's due to a system of institutions, norms, and laws that took many decades to establish and which Trump and Musk are rapidly destroying.
Speaking of brain drain, if you're worried about brain drain, surely capriciously ending most science funding is the LAST thing you want to do. Even a "pause" in the grants is forcing labs to close and scientists to find other jobs, and that's not something you can just undo later, even if you want to.
Building things is hard and time consuming, while destroying can be done in an instant.
They're not wrong about the norms and institutions being ideologically corrupted. Wokeness/DEI is essentially just civil rights, which has been woven deeply into the fabric of american government for at least 50 years.
> Speaking of brain drain, if you're worried about brain drain, surely capriciously ending most science funding is the LAST thing you want to do...
Mostly I want those scientists to go back to their home countries and open labs and invent things there. (I would also like the wealthiest countries with the most talent and technology to use their resources and expertise to increase their birthrates and start *exporting* talent to the rest of the planet, which is what would happen in a sane world.)
I also thought it was a bit strange that the people deciding what to spend money on don't also decide how to do it. But I don't necessarily agree with:
>In a strongly adversarial system, the party that doesn't hold executive power has an incentive to block everything and create the impression that nothing is going well- thus encouraging low-information voters to vote for the party out of power, rewarding them for their intransigence.
For example, the Reps blocked the Dem immigration bill that might have alleviated some of the inflow of migrants, helping the Reps win and take stronger actions against migrants than the Dems would have had they won. So far, voters seem to approve, demonstrating that the block contributed to a better outcome, at least on migration
Sounds like a strong argument for expanding Congressional staff so they can actually do the job the Constitution assigns them?
I think you are getting confused between cutting budgets vs. cutting programs.
The legislature sets the budget that they want to spend on an issue. 'We think protecting voting rights is worth $24B/year and that's how much we want you to spend on it'. The legislature gets to decide what the priorities are and how important they are in this way, teh Executive doesn't get to just say 'actually I think voting rights aren't important, I'm only going to spend $2m on it and put the rest in a sock drawer'.
However, the Executive is in charge of using that money to implement actual programs to achieve the goal, and they can cut or add or alter programs within the guidelines set by the legislature more or less as they see fit. So they can cut a program that's not working and funnel that into a more effective effort on the same topic, as long as they're ultimately pursuing the agenda and budgets set by the legislature.
What are you saying, then? Trump has to take the ~270 billion allocated to the DoEd and spend it on education some other way? How does he accomplish any actual cost-cutting?
The President can't achieve cost cutting. Congress sets the budget. It's a Constitutional crisis if the executive intentionally doesn't follow the budget that the legislature has mandated by law. This is why the federal judges are ordering that spending continue, because the rationale for cuts doesn't seem like "we think this particular program is bad so we're reassigning the money" which could be resonable, but rather a broad-strokes redirection of budgeting.
The President can make things more efficient and get better outcomes with the same money, work with legislators using the bully pulpit to get his vision of the budget passed, and veto budgets he doesn't want. But not change the law (unless the judges say he can, we'll see)
He accomplishes cost cutting by being the leader of his party and encourages the legislature - which his party runs, more or less - to do so.
He accomplishes it by identifying the best he could do on the topic with a reduced budget, and informing the legislature about that.
He accomplishes it by talking to the American people about how it is being administered, and convincing them that cuts can be made without great loss.
Etc.
By working across the aisle with Congress, like Biden did to pass various bills that were ideologically aligned with his values. Republicans already won't impeach Trump no matter what, and he's criminally immune for most actions he will take, so he's already in the best spot for leverage.
Obviously Trump will squander this moment like when he had both houses of Congress in his first term, instead focusing on consolidating executive power for himself and engaging in unconstitutional actions like impoundment and disobeying courts.
I'm still waiting to see if Trump will deliver on mass deportations or any substantive cuts of federal spending (USAID and even the department of education are drops in the bucket, relatively speaking), so you're right that he may well squander this moment.
I'm kinda skeptical that impoundment is especially unconstitutional, though?
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/4736824-trump-is-right-about-the-impoundment-control-act-its-unconstitutional/
One should also bear in mind that many provisions within the various US civil rights acts violate constitutional principles such as freedom of association, so there's plenty of finger-pointing to go around.
The reason there are isolated instances of impoundment by Presidents throughout history is because there doesn't need to be 100% autistic adherence to laws - a functioning government is one where the branches act in good faith, reciprocate norms, and respect the power that competing branches have, sometimes engaging in minor power plays, sometimes allowing minor plays. Nixon severely abused that leeway, which is why the Impoundment Act was passed, and why every single challenge to it in court has resulted in judges and justices reiterating that without the power of the purse, Congress's laws are merely advisory to the President, which is why giving Presidents the unchecked power of impoundment completely undermines article 2 of the Constitution, and that the only way Presidents can impound funds is subject to Congress's lawmaking.
I seriously doubt your characterization of provisions in the Civil Rights Act as being unconstitutional, considering it has even longer precedence than the Impoundment Act, and has been upheld by various court rulings since its passing, like the Impoundment Act.
As a former Fed with budget authority you are wrong on that one first one. We have complete executive discretion to NOT execute the funds and simply return the budget to Treasury at end of year. Historically that was a career ender as the President expected you to execute his budget requests and agency heads hated getting grilled by Congress for not spending their money BUT as long as the President and Agency Head are willing to back you up, they can basically just refuse to execute under the guise of fraud, waste, and abuse, namely waste in this example.
If GS-11 Jane doesn't need a screwdriver, there is no law that will arrest her for not submitting a fraudulent procurement request under the FAR for a new wasteful screwdriver. People miss in practice how the budget is actually executed, one FAR request at a time tens of millions times a year. If nobody submits a request, no money is executed, as simple as that. And those requests come from the rank and file, not leadership.
I get what you mean but I think that's different from the President deciding to withhold funds or shut down agencies.
Maybe the President could fire everyone at an agency and replace them with people who don't think they agency should exist and they can all simultaneously say that they don't need any money this year thank you very much.
But AFAIK the The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 prevents the President from just withholding funds from agencies and programs he doesn't like. Or at least that such acts have to be immediately reported to Congress and the president has to abide by Congress telling him to stop it.
Correct but the President can simply direct his employees to NOT submit any procurement requests or direct the procurement approving officials to simply not approve any on pains of firing for cause under insubordination. That isn't withholding funds, that's simply doing something Presidents and Agency Heads rarely do, actually supervise and direct their subordinates.
Going through a list of abstracts to determine what's actually woke seems like a fine task for a secretary, but probably even better for an intern.
Applying for grants at a research university is wonky at best. Challenging accepted science does not make to many friends. When I was helping with gender differentiation studies, the corner stone of research, you find hunter gather evidence every time you look. If I needed the money, it would have been to easy to add the statement ….. “which could help promote women to higher positions etc…” to almost any project
So, of the $2.05 billion awarded by the NSF during the Biden-Harris administration that Senator Ted Cruz accused of being woke, only 40% * $2.05 billion = $.82 billion was for woke programs.
This is like the finding after the release of the Venona files that only about half the large number of people that Senator Joseph McCarthy had accused of being Soviet agents were actually Soviet agents.
No, the NSF gave about $40 billion in grants. Only 40% of the $2.05 billion that Ted Cruz *accused* of being woke was woke.
Right, sloppy wording on my part. But that is what I meant. Will fix.
Yes, I suspect this is a problem that DOGE is going to run into pretty soon. Actually cutting government spending in a meaningful way is going to involve axing a lot of social programs that are not recognisably 'woke' or 'DEI' in the modern sense.
I mean we don't really know that 40% of the funding was going to wokeness or whatever. I would suspect that "non-woke" programs probably cost more money on average.
Given that accusing somebody of being a Soviet agent was pretty life-ruining, I think a comparable failure rate would still be pretty bad.
Also "woke science" isn't the same as trying to undermine the United States on behalf of its principle adversary.
It's not? I thought all 'woke' was just Communism in disguise? Or Marxism? (The accusers arent really attentive to nuance)
Comparing Marxism with critical social justice, it's easy to find big gaps in ideas and practices, which are papered over by right-wing publicists.
But one can also compare people. Consider sophisticated advocates of Marxism in the US in the 1920s-1960s. Think about where they tended to live, what sorts of things they majored in in university, what jobs they tended to have, how they tended to volunteer, what genres of literature they tended to read for pleasure, whether they tended to be atheists or believers, etc.
Now do the same for sophisticated advocates of critical social justice in the US today.
In terms of social class, are the sophisticated advocates for critical social justice today similar to the sophisticated advocates for Marxism back then?
I recall something Lenin said about social class in the new Bolshevik state: "The whole question is—who will overtake whom?"
>about social class in the new Bolshevik state
No, it was primarily about the worldwide communism/capitalism fight. Which is kind of relevant here - old-style commies could be meaningfully accused of being Moscow's stooges, whereas the center of wokeness nowadays is America itself.
I can't answer this by reading the original Russian, but I can submit the following prompt to Perplexity.
>When Lenin used his famous question often shortened to "Who whom", was he talking about class conflict in territory under Bolshevik control, or about competition between the Bolshevik territory and capitalist-run countries?"
Here is Perplexity's answer. Note paragraph #2 explains what Lenin initially meant. Nothing else is relevant to the original meaning, but I include it for completeness.
>Lenin's famous question "Who whom?" (кто кого?) primarily referred to class conflict within society, but it also applied to the broader struggle between socialist and capitalist systems12.
>The phrase originated from Lenin's statement at the second All-Russian Congress of Political Education Departments in 1921: "The whole question is—who will overtake whom?"2. This formulation was initially used to describe the inevitability of class struggle within society, focusing on which class would dominate the other2.
>Lenin viewed all interactions as zero-sum, with one side gaining at the expense of the other1. This perspective applied to:
> Internal class conflict: The struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie within Soviet society12.
> International competition: The contest between the socialist system in the Soviet Union and capitalist countries45.
>Stalin later invoked the shortened form "who whom" in 1929, giving it an "aura of hard-line coercion" and emphasizing the struggle between the Soviet Union and capitalist powers25. He framed it as a question of whether the Soviet Union would defeat the capitalists or vice versa2.
>In essence, Lenin's "Who whom?" encapsulated both internal class dynamics and the broader ideological conflict between socialism and capitalism on the world stage
Citing 8 sources:
https://newcriterion.com/article/leninthink/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who,_whom%3F
https://www.crisiscritique.org/storage/app/media/2025-02-07/peter-hallward.pdf
https://againstthecurrent.org/atc232/lenins-perspective-what-exactly-does-it-mean-to-vote-part-2/
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,953313-6,00.html
https://www.workersliberty.org/files/2020-09/fateintro.pdf
https://russian.stackexchange.com/questions/14118/is-there-a-longer-version-of-lenins-quote-%D0%BA%D1%82%D0%BE-%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE-%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%82
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_and_Revolution
The really dedicated advocate of politically muscular "anti-wokeness" as exemplified by the Musk-Trump administration does not actually believe in a unified "America" as understood by people who have positive memories of high school civics class circa 2000 or so.
They believe in what, in a moment of candor, they might call "my America, but not <i>our</i> America." A definition of 'America' which includes only themselves and the people they perceive as being willing to help them get what they want.
For the oligarchs, this means "I am actually in charge, and the only real Americans are the ones I like, with the ones I can dupe into supporting me being vaguely relevant background figures and everyone else being collateral damage waiting to happen."
For the median voter who supports this kind of thing, it means "the real Americans are me, people I think are just like me, and of course the oligarchs I trust to destroy those I am told are to blame for all my problems."
Brown people, 'uppity' women who question the social order, nerds who talk about things like global warming as if they exist, and so forth... are not actually "Americans" in the mind of the kind of person who thinks the Musk-Trump administration is doing the right thing. Not really. Not in the way that I was taught to think of the definition of 'American' back in high school civics in the twentieth century.
>The really dedicated advocate of politically muscular "anti-wokeness" as exemplified by the Musk-Trump administration does not actually believe in a unified "America"
Sure, and neither do their leftist counterparts. But both sides claim to be patriotic, in their way, and I think they're largely honest about that.
"Is this person a Soviet Agent" is a pretty objective standard: either they're sending reports back to Moscow or they're not.
"Is this program woke" is by no means an objective standard. Even from Scott's good-faith reading, it *mostly* sounds like "affiliated with the social sciences" is the main thing being selected for, with some degree of political gloss. And I say that as a hard-science person with a LONG history of rolling his eyes at social-science silliness.
Now, it's a fair question what fraction of science funding should go towards social sciences. But turning that in to a debate over a trendy and largely-meaningless political buzzword may rank among the least productive ways to do that.
Notably, social science funding is and has always been a tiny sliver compared to hard-science funding.
Addressing "Broader Impacts" is required in most NSF grants, including in the abstract. Broadening participation in science from those traditionally underrepresented (some races/ethnicities, those with disabilities, gender in some fields) is explicitly listed as a potential Broader Impact by the NSF. This has nothing to do with Biden; it's been in place for---literally---decades. It's definitely the case that the political trends of the last ~ decade have changed the focus of Broader Impacts in some fields, but this is nothing new. It is different than that case at other federal agencies, e.g., NASA, which do not have a long history of similar considerations and added them only recently, if at all.
Someone somewhere in this thread (how TF can anyone follow such a long thread?!) mentioned examples of broader impacts like "national security" or "increased economic competitiveness" or "increased well-being". I think this is what's bothering me about this whole debate. "National security" can refer (in for example DoD) grants to actions that support Ukraine (and thus strengthen NATO) or actions that support Israel (an ally, but also possibly lead to deaths in Gaza). (Or obviously to other things besides Ukraine or Israel). We can disagree about which side we support in either of these cases, but the laudable goal of improving national security doesn't itself bother us. "Increased economic competitiveness" *can* mean in polluting industries or in sustainable industries, but the phrase itself is laudable, no problem with it. "increased well-being" of ... whom exactly? Don't worry about it, no problem. These are all seen, somehow, as apolitical. But suddenly research that promises to specifically benefit underrepresented communities is A) outside the legitimate scientific scope and B) woke and therefore bullshit, and C) automatically divisive.
*Any* broader impact will imply some political or moral choice. I don't get why DEI concerns are sillier or more ridiculous than any other type of broader impact. Because they exclude some populations and don't improve the lives of everyone? Neither do the others.
Change "women and underrepresented minorities" to "men and whites." Not a big deal, right? Because every category favors some populations over others, it's perfectly fine to favor men and whites over others.
Not fine at all. Simply what's been done for hundreds of years. And which Trump et.al. now want to go back to, because hundreds of years wasn't enough for them. If you think elimination of DEI makes everything neutral, a level playing field, that's just a very naive and ahistorical viewpoint.
Wow! That provoked quite a response! But I think your very natural emotion shows that formally favoring and disfavoring racial groups is emotionally, politically, and morally different than vaguely favoring the abstract "populations" (as you put it) related to the other categories.
I think your more honest opinion is simply "I think it is good to formally discriminate against whites and men."
Oh. I didn't feel very emotional when I wrote it. Look, I will grant you there is a tension between addressing past *and continuing* inequities and avoiding creating new ones. It is very very difficult to accomplish, but it doesn't have to be zero-sum. You think my "honest" opinion is what you say; I think your honest one is that those past and continuing inequities (where non-white, non-male people have been subjugated) just aren't very important to you, especially if you might have to give something up, anything, even the tiniest privilege. I take back what I said: It doesn't sound like you want a level playing field, rather one that's tilted in your favor. But I see from your profile that you're liking posts praising JD Vance, so I doubt we will see eye to eye on this.
To understand why all these NSF grants have that final "woke" sentence, you need to understand that NSF grant applications include a Broader Impacts section in addition to the Scientific Merit section, with broader impacts potentially being a wide range of science education (eg, involving K12 teachers) and outreach -- not just specifically woke topics. This has been the case for much longer than the Biden-Harris administration and it is unfair to blame it on them even if you disagree that Broader impacts should be a criterion, or if you think that "woke" broader impacts in particular are inappropriate. Without understanding these constraints, the abstracts for NSF grants are going to seem odd, with a seemingly unrelated broader impacts sentence at the end.
If you just search "nsf broader impacts" on google you will get a whole page explaining the reasons for this requirement.
A quote from the NSF webpage here ---
Why does NSF focus on broader impacts?
By evaluating every proposal it receives according to its intellectual merit and its broader impacts, NSF ensures that publicly funded research has tangible benefits to society that go beyond increasing knowledge.
Some quick additional web searches reveal that broader impacts were always part of NSF, but became an actual review criterion in 1997 (the conservative 90s!).
In some way Broader Impacts were actually intended to persuade conservatives that NSF research was worthwhile (it helps American competitiveness!), so it is ironic that this is now the piece being most attacked.
Having actually submitted and reviewed NSF grants, sometimes the broader impact projects are very good and have a great impact, other times it was clearly a last minute add on and isn't likely to do a lot. However, since it is a requirement, it isn't really fair to now criticize the grant writers for just doing what NSF required.
From a fellow scientists, these two comments are actually how the system works. A lot of other comments here are misunderstanding/mischaracterizing where the woke content comes in, what it's like, and what Biden had to do with it (the answer to that last one is absolutely nothing).
Yes, and I just caught up with the other comments, still a lot of people blaming it on Biden. I tried! Alas I have no more time to spend on the comments, have to go do some real scientist things like reviewing a manuscript for a journal, writing an Introduction section for a research paper, and sending feedback to my MS student on her latest draft.... sometimes I even review NSF grants, but don't currently have one on my plate.
I have an NSF CAREER grant that's been recommended for funding. I'm waiting on the Notice of Award so I can find out if I have to fire staff in two weeks. I can't even give them two weeks' notice because I might get the money!
All of these folks cheering what's going on should spend about a minute imagining what it would be like if they had to fire a junior scientist from their team because Ted Cruz or Elon Musk Ctrl+Fed them (ahem) and decided that their grant had Bad Words in it
Oh no, that is excruciating! I can't imagine... Sending you my best wishes, hope it all works out.
I've been "joking" lately that this is the first time in my life that I have actually been happy to not have US Federal funding. I work in China part time (USA the rest), and all my funding is from here. That has its own challenges of course... but the main focus is on producing solid research and publishing it in good quality journals, which is what I want to do no matter what country I am in. I also find myself feeling lucky that I am getting old and could retire any time if things get too bad. I have a lot of sympathy for younger colleagues; it wasn't easy for me, but it is much worse now.
Hang in there! I bet your Broader Impacts are great :), as well as your Scientific Merit of course.
Thank you for the kind words :) I’m on the other side of the arc, I’m young enough that I’m wondering whether I’ll really be able to (or want to) spend the rest of my career in the US. I’m at a leading institution, so it’s hard to think about leaving. At the same time, it’s quickly becoming unclear whether the US is going to have any leading institutions in another 20 years.
It’s encouraging to hear that your experience in China is that you can focus on the research!
If people doing good research were previously adding woke disclaimers "our research will help Black and Hispanic people, women too, and especially Black trans women" under duress in order to try to get funded, now they will simply stop. This is a good thing. (Also not pictured is all the equally good research that previously wasn't funded because the grant application writers didn't bend the knee).
I agree it is good to stop from here onward. I don't think it's necessary to light a billion dollars on fire (by canceling half-done projects) in order to send the message that you're now against this kind of thing.
I agree that when previous good research wasn't funded, that was also bad.
How do the sizes of the different badnesses compare?
So far Biden's is worse, but he had four years to be bad and Trump has had three weeks, so we'll see!
By the way, did we ever actually establish that everyone *did* have to throw their pinch of sentimental incense to women or racial minorities in order to get their grants approved by the Biden-era NSF? In the article I seem to recall that you only looked at the specific items Ted Cruz had already singled out, and he assuredly wouldn't have gone looking for any grant proposals that LACKED that pinch of incense.
So as far as I know, it could be that up to 90% of the successful grant proposals include no such incense, which rather calls into question the proposition of "Biden made everyone sacrifice to 'wokeness' and this is very bad."
I agree that lighting a billion dollars on fire for fun isn't a good idea, but would make the following points:
- Close to half of the projects appear to already be finished, so nothing would be lit on fire there
- It is far from clear that the plan is to cancel all the listed grants. The link explicitly says "Chairman Cruz has requested significant scrutiny of awards listed in the database." Scrutiny is good. Your analysis would suggest that 40-60% of the awards should stand up to said scrutiny.
- To the extent that money hasn't been spent yet, it will be available for spending on something else (so the loss is much less than 100%). And/or the original recipients can do a few hours work to reapply without the woke language.
Add these three together and the stakes are likely dramatically smaller.
Iirc, you've also noted previously the dominance of tit-for-tat strategies. If one side completely corrupts a process for ideological ends, "ok, back to normal from now" leaves the original wrongdoing unpunished. There's no incentive to not immediately do the same next time. Some level of punishment for those who did this and benefitted from doing so is probably optimal.
Also, on a personal note. I'm a researcher. I've refused to bend the knee and add nonsense woke stuff to grant applications. I've had pointless bureaucratic administrators add months of delay because of insistence of adding woke things to studies. I must admit I have limited sympathy to those who increased their chances of winning grants by caving to this stuff (if more of them had refused, it would not have spread through the system so easily).
So what got the pointless bureaucratic administrators to drop their demand that you add woke features to studies? In my experience it is pointless to talk to bureaucrats about what's fair and sensible, because they don't reference those concepts when making decisions. The reference the rules.
I'm not inclined to go into too much detail (anonymity, sorry), but in very general terms:
- bureaucrats are apparently fond of adding criteria that are not actually stated in the rules, they are just their crazy reinterpretation of said rules. (A good example of this is Title VI - for 60 years there has been a law stated by congress that very clearly said "universities that take federal funding can't discriminate based on race in anything they do" which university administration decided to interpret as "but actually, we really want to, so we can"). Still, as you say, you're still fighting with *them* about *their* crazy interpretation of said rules, so redress is limited in the very short term.
- you can imagine a situation where (to be able to measure something you want to measure) you want to ask question A. The bureaucrat decides they don't like this, and says you have to ask A' instead. (In this case, A' was not merely some woke formulation, it also would not capture the same thing, and thus would have yielded useless data).
- They might be able to stop you from asking A, but they probably can't make you do A', you can likely choose to do neither. (Which of course is bad. They've actively made the research less informative).
Amen, my academic brother/sister!
In my neck of the woods, SMALL grants under the NSF's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) have so far allowed me to avoid forced DEI documents in the form of Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC, which is very different than the standard "Broader Impacts" section of a proposal), see:
https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2022/nsf22125/nsf22125.jsp#q2
BPC has also been pushed at department level by NSF and CRA, where creating committees to establish department-wide BPC documents is common. It's been revised recently, likely due to the recent EO, but see:
https://bpcnet.org/
The last time I (politely) raised concerns about compelling our department's faculty members to participate in BPC activities (tying it to to the annual-review process), I was called a racist. I still managed to nix this stuff after working with a couple fellow faculty members, but it was stressful, time-consuming (on top of my normal job obligations), and at least one colleague won't talk with me anymore.
Anyway, we didn't police ourselves well, and now we get the backlash. Sure, it'd be great to avoid collateral damage (e.g., potential, massive cuts to the NSF's budget), but in my opinion anyone expecting a nuanced response after a decade (?) of DEI bullying is delusional.
If Congress does not repeal or amend Title 42, which (as several scientists have observed) actually requires NSF grant applicants to discuss the broader societal impacts of their work, or a court case does not rule said law unconstitutional, then nobody has stopped anything. They are just still running the election instead of running the country.
You literally think it's evil for scientists to consider the broader societal aspects of their work? Are you familiar with the history of science?
He literally said nothing like what you wrote.
It’s keeping it as a requirement he’s objecting to.
They can easily put some centrist milquetoast guff there instead, about how it raises the prestige of science or whatever.
There’s confusion about whether NSF grants with “DEI language” are getting canceled. They aren’t—at least not right now. A federal court issued a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) that the DOJ says applies to all NSF awards, so funds are still flowing.
However, we’ve been told to comply with new Executive Orders regarding DEIA content. In my own NSF grant, that basically means I’m scrapping the local high-school panel I had planned at an upcoming career day. If you want details, here’s the TRO: (https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/TRO-NY-v-Trump-1.31.25.pdf).
Basically the best solution is now in practice--the real science still gets done and the DEI stuff gets skipped.
"Also not pictured is all the equally good research that previously wasn't funded because the grant application writers didn't bend the knee"
Evidence that this exists?
I'm aware that the oh-so-edgy "bend the knee" phrasing makes it sound like a heroic act of defiance. But I'm extremely skeptical that anyone who thinks not inserting a throwaway sentence or two into their grant applications is a worthwhile hill for their time and effort to die on is capable of producing any worthwhile research anyway. And that skepticism has nothing at all to do with the political valence of the throwaway sentences: this sort of silly cultural baggage exists in a great many contexts (yes, some of them right-coded) and being unable or unwilling to navigate it seems like a pretty crippling weakness in almost any collaborative context.
>But I'm extremely skeptical that anyone who thinks not inserting a throwaway sentence or two into their grant applications is a worthwhile hill for their time and effort to die on is capable of producing any worthwhile research anyway.
If someone's willing to pander in a grant application, she's probably not amazingly devoted to the truth, which devalues any reports she produces.
"If someone's willing to pander in a grant application, she's probably not amazingly devoted to the truth"
Wow. This is...this is one great big ol' disconnect here. I think if someone uttered this sentence to my face I would have laughed out loud. Either you and I live in VERY different worlds or this is QUITE the isolated demand for rigor.
In my world, people who are that level of "amazingly devoted to the truth" go off and find a comfortable cave to live as hermits. Not necessarily because "hermithood" is the best way they can possible pursue the truth, but because they have literally no other job prospects. None.
Personally, I am made of much more cowardly stuff. When I'm having a holiday meal with my extended family and somebody says grace, I don't pipe up with a long-winded explanation of why *clearly* God does not exist. When somebody working a customer service job tells me to "have a nice day" I don't reply with "you clearly don't care about what kind of day I have, so kindly drop the pretense." On the few occasions that I worked such jobs, I didn't tell people "I don't care at all what sort of day you have, and won't think about you ever again once you walk out the door." When I'm writing cover letters for a job application, I talk up my strengths and decline to mention my more embarrassing moments: I certainly don't *lie* mind you, but anybody who doesn't realize a cover letter is 95% pandering (with the remaining 5% being your contact info) has QUITE a set of blinders on.
Don't get me wrong, the truth is very important. Sticking up for the truth CAN be one of the most important things you ever do, if you have halfway-decent judgement. But the sort of person who would decide to Take a Brave and Noble Stand for the Truth when they're filling out bullshit paperwork certainly can't have got the education to do worthwhile science in any case: they can't even have got the education to move out of their parents' basement (not until they find a decent cave anyway).
I feel tangentially obligated to nitpick that, as a retail grunt, some of us do actually care about whether you're having a nice day (even after you've left the store). Customer-facing stuff is, uh, not my strong area, but the same autist tendencies also drive towards optimization...so honest to God* I still ruminate now and then about times I fucked up bigly and made a customer's experience worse, years ago. Gotta do better! It's true that this is an outlier, and stereotypes of disinterested retail exist for a reason...but I'm sorry nonetheless that you've been soured into cynicism from shitty (dis)service. Not enough followers of Abadar to go around, these days.
(It's true though, anyone who can't at least even pretend to try to care about others is gonna have a hard time getting and staying hired in such jobs. I'd like to think my employer is a bit more discerning at picking out higher quality sociopaths. We Have Standards Here, damnit.)
*figure of speech
If her research topic is infected with a bunch of woke concepts she doesn’t even think are valid, then yeah that’s pandering. if it’s on cancer or other things unrelated to Woke, then why isn’t sticking in a token woke sentence about how treating this cancer will benefit minorities in the same category as Mozart flattering his patron?
I did put in the "probably" for a reason.
Ah, it’s a content-free ad hominem move. You are probably a low quality discussant.
Banned x 30 days.
There is no evidence that you would accept. Any proposals that were rejected for not including it (which, yes, I DO think is "a heroic act of defiance"), you would simply declare it's because the people applying were too stupid to produce what you would consider "worthwhile research."
"There is no evidence that you would accept. "
That sounds like an excuse from someone who doesn't actually have any evidence.
Yes, it WOULD sound like that to you.
I mean, yes. Any reply that doesn't include evidence DOES sound like "I have no evidence."
You can cut out the silly character attacks and provide some evidence any time you want.
I second the interpretation that this guy you are responding to is not interested in evidence, and would not accept any that is provided. When you start with "anyone who would oppose this and not cave out of personal integrity can't do good research" I don't think you're actually engaging in good faith.
Why not share what evidence you have, and even if it doesn't satisfy the person you're replying to, it might satisfy or at least influence other readers?
Wait, do you have any evidence for this? What are examples of good NSF grants that were rejected for not including these sorts of sentences?
> being unable or unwilling to navigate it seems like a pretty crippling weakness in almost any collaborative context.
I have a doc note saying Im schizotypal; mind calling me worthless for being unemployed directly.
At no point in my life have I ever believed that either illness or unemployment made a person worthless or inferior. In fact, I rather strongly believe that your personal struggles deserve support, compassion and understanding, as do everyone's.
But for all that, I'm not above mentioning pretty staggering irony here. Do you see it? It's not subtle. Here you being on my case because my (apparently) my honest framing of the issue was not woke enough for you. Beautiful.
Yes, yes, you're all for respecting mentally ill people until they start saying things you disagree with. How quickly that "tolerance" fades...
I've made it quite clear that I don't want to talk to you, so your whining about respect is pretty hollow. I suppose I'll probably have to just block you, since you're either unable or unwilling to abide by that boundary.
Guy who says anyone who disagrees with him is incapable of doing anything useful complains about behavioral norms.
Oh I think Im the sane one and I could easily find some offensive political memes that ive reshared would get me fired from my jobs in current year that would (probably) make ya hate me
I tend to have a low tolerance for bullshit, its not going well for me; I want to put you to make an uncomfortable choice; Im not usually called stupid, either Im being kicked out for my socail failing and thats worth it or the system suck and it shouldnt
When you filter for anything beside meritocracy, you will lose some amount of talent. Make your choice, is it worth it to you?
"When you filter for anything beside meritocracy, you will lose some amount of talent. Make your choice, is it worth it to you?"
YES! Emphatically, resoundingly, unquestionably yes. A thousand times yes. It is EXTREMELY worth it. It wouldn't even be possible to MAKE such a choice in a world that filtered purely on "talent" because such a world could never have anything as elaborate as a university, a corporation or a nation-state.
In case the point is lost on you, THE most important power humans have is our power of *working together.* Nothing in our lives would be possible without it. Even if it were possible to filter *purely* for talent, no organization of any size could possibly function that way. Talent is very important in many fields, but you are generally MUCH better off with people who are merely *very talented* but also capable of working well with others than finding more talented[1] people who can only work well alone. Science is a collaborative endeavor. So are most other things humans do.
If I'm reading him right, then, none of this has to do with the POLITICAL right or left.
Let me say clearly that I don't think not working well with others is a moral failing of any stripe and I genuinely want to build a world where people who with that deficit can live comfortable and fulfilling lives. But basic social skills still need to be a very high priority for any sort of practical endeavor.
[1] But usually only slightly more, because when you're already on the far-right (EDIT: as in "far in the positive direction" nothing to do with left-right in the political sense) end of the distribution, moving even further right is quite costly.
> But usually only slightly more, because when you're already on the far-right end of the distribution, moving even further right is quite costly.
Not really; it truely is insufferable to be inside the politically correct bubble. The trade off of facists posting videos of accidental suicides, (got to say my least favorite genre of gore posting) is easily worth it. I love untethered arguments and how they do just.... resolve; compared to the drama of elsewhere.
"Anyone who thinks differently to me on this issue is incapable of doing good research, and reveals themselves unable to work in collaborative environments" says area man who goes on to accuse others of "character attacks".
I'm not quite sure what else someone insisting that I definitely won't evaluate the evidence (that they haven't actually provided) could be.
As for the rest, put up or shut up. If your position has merit, you'll be able to support it with something more than bad-faith summaries of others' responses. Show me some of this potentially-excellent research that isn't getting funded.
Kindly go away. I have no interest in talking to you because you are not interested in the truth.
Yeah, if someone’s doing good research I think getting the research done is the right hill to die on.
Well, yes. That's exactly my point. Suppose you're doing good research and you need a grant to continue it. You apply for the grant. The directions for applying say "The application should include a statement that says X."
Even if you firmly believe ¬X, is "sticking up for the truth" on one line of a grant application that nobody beside the grant committee is ever going to read the most important thing you should be doing? Or is following the directions and getting your grant and continuing your research MORE important? Do you want to die on the hill of never, ever saying "X" even in a stupid context where the statement costs you nothing and the refusal costs you everything? Or do you want to keep your eyes on the prize of getting your research done?
Note that I am NOT taking a position here on whether "The application should include a statement that says X" is a reasonable part of the grant application. It may be, it may not be (it depends on both what X actually is, and the wider context). But even for X where it isn't it is *usually* a pretty damn easy requirement to meet. So I'm very skeptical that there is any substantial number of otherwise-good scientists whose careers have been derailed by such a requirement.
What about scientists who aren't politically savvy enough to know about the shibboleths they need to say to not be committing "A HEROIC ACT OF DEFIANCE!" Must navigating woke politics be a required skill for unrelated scientific research?
That is QUITE a different question. The original was asking "what about people who know what the grant requirements are and refuse to follow them on principle?" You're asking "what if the grant requirements are unclear and some otherwise good scientists don't understand them?"
To be as clear as possible: I am NOT taking any position on whether the current requirements are either clear or reasonable. But if the main issue somebody has with the requirements are "they require applicants to write some silly things that don't perfectly reflect their beliefs," that is an *incredibly* tiny, silly, unimportant issue. "The requirements are unclear to the point some good applicants fail to meet them" is potentially a much more serious issue. But really we *should* be bringing in actual evidence before discussing *either issue.*
I’m fairly sure they *won’t* “simply stop”. Instead they will try to guess what the new political correctness is, and add sentences like “make America great” into unrelated research about blood cell proteins or whatever. There will be new knees bent, and they will be ones that understand that their funding can’t be saved by doing science, but only by being politically correct.
I find it plausible that phrases like "restore American dynamism" and "strengthen American resolve" and "keep the US ahead of its great-power competitors" will become common in applications that have something to do with national competitiveness, which can include many aspects of health.
But I find it implausible that they will become common in applications that have nothing to do with national competitiveness. And I find it implausible that a shibboleth like "make America great" will become common in any sort of application.
Wait, why not? You can make an argument for any research furthering US interests. And if they can't find a good argument, it simply won't be funded.
If Musk stays in charge of the country for long enough to affect a round or two of grant applications, everyone will quickly learn what words the grant boards are looking for and put them in.
This (or at least the meaningful version*) is one of the most ridiculous predictions I have ever heard. I would be stunned if in 4 years time American academia is broadly considered to be "more hospitable to conservatives than progressives, to favour whites and males and conservatives in hiring / promotions / grant applications at the expense of equally capable women / minorities / progressives, to police normie left wing speech more aggressively than normie right wing speech and so forth".
If you really believe this, you should make a public bet with someone.
* 4 years later: "look, I can find one person who put some right coded language in a grant application, while ignoring that academia continues to be broadly intolerant of and inhospitable to conservative speech, ideas and people. I win." If that's your motte, you've already admitted the critique of universities is correct.
My claim isn’t that the political persuasions of academics will change. My claim is rather that they will just have a much stronger and harsher set of language police to deal with, requiring them to say even more things they don’t believe in to get funding (because at least some of them believed the old words they were putting in, while this time very few of them will and it will entirely be political virtue signaling).
"A stronger and harsher set of language police to live in". Riiiight, real likely story this.
The old set of language police, whatever their faults, didn't try to freeze all funding on their first week in office until they had been satisfied it wasn't going to anything they disagreed with.
A few things:
1) The grant's call for applications often has a *requirement* that you do something to promote diversity or something.
2) I'm curious as to whether there is a correlation between grant size and wokeness. You've established that there are probably about 500 woke grants on the list, but do they actually account for $250M? If the woke garbage grants are for less money on average it could be substantially less than that (or more if they are more money on average).
3) I'm not sure that Cruz actually would consider this a failure. The point is to be PR. Saying that you found 3400 grants totaling $2B is much better PR than saying you found 500 totaling $250M, and how many people are actually going to check your work?
This situation sucks, but I'm less sympathetic to the scientists than you are. If you include some weasel words in your grant proposals to try to trick politicians and bureaucrats into thinking your research is woke when it actually isn't you can't really complain when politicians and bureaucrats think your research is woke when it isn't (even if hypothetically you did a poor job).
I wrote some grant proposals in a past life. It's very common to shoehorn in something that the grantor wants - not even necessarily related to anything "woke". It's just part of the nature of grant writing.
I also did this. Should note that it's often an admin lady or intern who adds these "weasel words" to increase their chances, not the scientists themselves.
See the comment above you - "The grant's call for applications often has a *requirement* that you do something to promote diversity or something."
I don't think scientists should be morally required to give up and go into a different field just because people demanded some weasel words about diversity before approving grants.
Yeah, I get it. I'm not blaming scientists for playing the game they were forced into, but the indignation about Ted Cruz misrepresenting studies as woke when they aren't seems pretty unreasonable. He isn't the one doing that, they are. Interpreted in that light, the tweet you cited seems particularly obnoxious:
https://x.com/HermanPontzer/status/1890059071140815282
This is literally his job now. Is it too much to expect him to be vaguely familiar with what the rules and practices were before a month ago? I just flat out don’t buy he can be this ignorant, and don’t accept it as a credible excuse.
Obviously he is aware of what the rules and practices were a month ago. What does that have to do with my comment?
I'll note that if a substantial chunk of scientists had loudly refused to do this, the administration would likely have had to walk it back.
Yup. Lots of johnny come latelies on this DEI topic who are prepared to say DEI is bad, but seemingly only now that they've decided its a vote loser for Dems. Until then, it was put up and shut up and let those who disagreed be tarred and feathered. I'm glad they're finally not afraid to speak up, but frankly, exactly why should their advice be taken particularly seriously now? When it mattered, they weren't prepared to speak the truth.
As much as I harp about the disinformation board being a major black mark on the Biden admin's intent, they did indeed wrap it all up because enough people complained and enough people blocked it in court.
Scientists are not generally selected for bravery, though, and most people are very bad at pushing back when it might hurt their wallet.
The longstanding Broader Impacts criterion, predating Biden, has been explained to you, why do you keep framing it as solely requiring 'weasel words about diversity'?
IIRC you are a psychiatrist by profession, yes? Have you ever applied for an NSF or NIH grant?
It's not about tricking politicians and bureaucrats. I have evaluated grants (not these specifically, but others), and there are rubrics that you follow based on the RFP (request for proposal). If the RFP has listed DEI stuff, the rubric will have a section on it. To improve your chance at success you should find someway, however tangential, to give yourself a shot at not getting a 0 on that section.
Side note: I understand why it's there, but I would love if the entire section on broader impacts went away. Let proposers focus on the science they actually know, and not waste time speculating on how it might have beneficial knock-on effects down the line.
>I would love if the entire section on broader impacts went away. Let proposers focus on the science they actually know, and not waste time speculating on how it might have beneficial knock-on effects down the line.
Agreed! My career was in the private sector, but we sometimes had loosely analogous weasel words sections, and, at best they wasted the time and effort to misconstrue what we were actually doing, and at worst they diluted the focus on the actual work.
Really? Don't spend *any* time contemplating the possible effects of their work?
Is this a serious comment? You cannot possibly believe that writing that garbage involves contemplating the possible effects of their work.
What 'garbage' in particular? Show me you actually know what you are talking about.
> The project also aims to integrate research findings into undergraduate teaching and promote equitable outcomes for women in computer science through K-12 outreach program.
> a Hispanic-serving institution and the lead site for the center
> The planned studies will provide opportunities to train engineering and biomedical science students who work collaboratively through highly interdisciplinary (engineering, molecular biology, virology and pharmacology) research studies and will enhance ongoing education and outreach activities focused on attracting underrepresented minority groups into these areas of research.
Did you read the post you are responding to?
Made-up crap. No one is saying that.
NSF grants aren't reviewed by 'politicians and bureaucrats'.
Do you specifically want scientists to be considering the impact their words might have on politicians egos when writing their grants or not? If you don’t, then you shouldn’t punish them for including words that hurt politicians egos - you should just stop punishing them for saying words that hurt different politicians egos.
This is too 10000ft view. If you want to prevent scientists from "considering the impact their words might have on politicians egos" you have to change the rules that forced them to do that in the first place. The transition is what is causing the current issues, not the end state Ted Cruz is pursuing. I don't necessarily agree with the way he is going about it, but the things he is being blamed for seem a little illogical.
> The transition is what is causing the current issues
...because the change to the rules is bad and wrong. It should have been "you no longer have to include the magic words", not "you must never include the magic words". The point here is that the latter is just as bad as requiring the magic words was.
I disagree, I don't think making up a fake social benefit should be permitted in grant writing. A better transition would be "you can no longer include the magic words, but existing grants are grandfathered in", but the problem with that is that some grants are genuinely woke enough that is a legitimate reason to want to suspend them and the current issue stems from failure to classify the two cases.
Why not just change the rules then? Why cancel all funds that are spent under old rules?
Dumb question and don't want to make more work for you, but were there cost differences between the actually woke and the non-woke categories? Were 40% of the grants == to 40% of the costs for the woke?
I too am interested in this question. My baseline is that woke stuff took less than 40%, because real science is expensive and woke outreach is not real science and is cheap. But that could easily be wrong.
I didn't check rigorously. I spot-checked five or six to see if there was a pattern and didn't see an obvious one.
In my experience, PIs put little effort and very little of their funds into their Broader Impacts activities for NSF. Usually almost all the funds go to science (equipment and salaries). For example, a common Broader Impact is to do a science outreach project like a science fair; in this situation, the current lab PI and students will spend some of their time on the science fair, but it is a small percentage, and no one is hired just for the science fair. So unless the grant is specifically for a "woke" purpose, I'd say no more than 10%, sometimes as low as 0%.
Thank you, again, for bringing an actually informed perspective into these dopey comments.
They could have gone even further. Besides for refusing all grant applications with "woke" markers, they could even preferably approve grants to those with "anti-woke" sentences. Grantees would be gambling on the election outcome if they put in a sentence from either side. Much like "wrong side of history" stuff, revenge against people who gave lip service to your opponents is a tactic that can work.
Of course, in this case, two factors should override this:
1. People *hate* this stuff. The requirements were part of what caused left's downfall. Punishing performative submission to the other side isn't *as* bad, but it's still likely very unpopular.
2. Gaining a handful of culture war points *isn't actually as important* as the actual science being done. Grant proposals are a terrible place to use as a culture war battlefield. It would be better for the right to just give in on this. Some people would keep adding woke sentences just in case, but it would slowly drop in frequency. People would be grateful.
> Some people would keep adding woke sentences just in case,
That's precisely what this whole thing is meant to stop. Your proposal might be fine if you expect the current policies to prevail forever (or at least for many decades), but if your expected time with power is ~8 years, ruthlessly punishing anyone adding in those sentences HELPS everyone who doesn't want to have to: making everyone conform to your new directives stops the other guys from retaliating against those who did when the return, even if only by favoring those who didn't "just in case."
'Our research on cancer cures will advance the state of the art in the field to where it is more difficult for inferior minds to comprehend, thus discouraging women and minorities from entering STEM education.'
Okay, I'm convinced. Maybe they SHOULD demand all applicants write things like this.
Why were you surprised by this failure mode?
Because I assume Ted Cruz has enough staffers that he can ask one of them to look through a list and see if it makes sense.
That would require Ted Cruz to act in good faith, which he never does.
The point of this list wasn't to provide a thoughtful review of NSF grant making. It's just a hyper-partisan attempt to score points. These guys do not care if what they are saying is true, false, exaggerated, whatever. They just want to make noise.
Obviously. Except to a goodly portion of commenters here.
You have that much faith in *Ted Cruz's* staffers?
I agree with @Gabriel. I'm not an American, but I'm guessing Ted Cruz (or his team) is not *really* unaware that his list contains both woke and genuinely non-woke research proposals. It's more likely that he added all of them together to get a nice, sensationalist *OMG DEMS GAVE $2 BILLION TO THE WOKES!!* headline, the same way that moderate Democrats and Republicans are often vilified by Bernie/AOC supporters as stooges to The Billionaires and The Corporations.
The bigger issue with all this is the descent into populism on both sides of the aisle. I'm an Indian, and it has been India's lived experience that when politicians are allowed by voters to descend into populism and vitriolic identity politics, it is the the voters and regular citizens that increasingly become disempowered economically and politically.
Ultimately, both the Dems and the Republicans are using taxpayer money to behave like spoiled trust fund kids, and I appreciate your efforts to call them out on this.
He can also ask staffers to make the largest list they can plausibly justify, so that he can announce a big number when describing how much 'junk woke science' Biden was funding and he is destroying.
Which is the thing that helps his political career.
I agree with Scott that 'Ted Cruz isn't good at identifying wokeness' is in fact a surprising failure mode.
Except ISTM Ted Cruz has identified wokeness and Scott has mis-identified it.
Wokeness isn’t e.g. ’this proposal will benefit this minority group, e.g. because it will cure a disease which particularly affects one ethnic group.’ I, and I imagine Ted Cruz, would be in favour of that.
Wokeness is e.g. benefiting minority groups is the only way we value things and therefore even proposals that don’t substantially benefit minorities have to pretend to do so.
I agree, but in that case it's the process, not the grants, that's woke. So why cancel the grants instead of amending the process?
Signalling, innit? I'm not saying cancelling the grants is what *I* would have done!
But these grants are full of all kinds of explanations of how their project will benefit all of the everything, not just minority groups. If wokeness is *ONLY* valuing things insofar as they benefit minorities, then we have construed wokeness narrowly enough that these grants don't really qualify.
Except, perhaps, the "study how university policy affects distinct sub-categories of black students," which I guess is 'woke' if the object of the game is to never think again about how university policy affects black people.
It's not just that scientists include things about how our work could help minorities in order to pass some Biden-era DEI filter. It's that discussing the Broader Impacts of the research you're proposing -- including how it's going to help minorities -- has been required by law of every grant since 1980. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Biden, except in the sense that Biden didn't push to change this law.
Here's that law: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:42%20section:1862p-14%20edition:prelim)
Here's the relevant quote (check out number 7):
§1862p–14. Broader Impacts Review Criterion
(a) Goals
The Foundation shall apply a broader impacts review criterion to identify and demonstrate project support of the following goals:
(1) Increasing the economic competitiveness of the United States.
(2) Advancing of the health and welfare of the American public.
(3) Supporting the national defense of the United States.
(4) Enhancing partnerships between academia and industry in the United States.
(5) Developing an American STEM workforce that is globally competitive through improved pre-kindergarten through grade 12 STEM education and teacher development, and improved undergraduate STEM education and instruction.
(6) Improving public scientific literacy and engagement with science and technology in the United States.
(7) Expanding participation of women and individuals from underrepresented groups in STEM.
This. And the grants in the non-woke and sorta-woke categories that only had a sentence about STEM diversity or such were not including it as an aside. They would have had a page or so (out of 15) that explained in detail what they were planning to do in this area, as part of the congressionally-established STEM workforce diversity option for broader impacts.
In my experience as a proposal writer and reviewer, you can probably assume an average of 2% of the total award funds would be devoted to such activities, which would be easily separable from the rest of the research.
What is your view of whether that part of the law is sensible? My career was in the private sector and when something loosely like this kind of side project was imposed, it cut into the focus on the main task. Maybe a 100,000 person company can have side projects with people devoted full time to them in a sensible way, but my (vague) impression is that research teams are too small for that.
The purpose of the law is not to add side projects, it’s to make scientists justify how their research will benefit the public. The list above just gives ways scientists might justify that. It doesn’t always take the form of side projects, and in my experience both as grantee and reviewer, grants are much more likely to get funded if the Broader Impacts are well integrated into the science itself, rather than just being a side project.
The reason this became law at all was due to scientifically illiterate congresspeople glancing at a grant for two seconds and raising hell about those dang scientists studying what fruit flies are attracted to. They made scientists have to justify how what they are studying could benefit the public. The irony of this now being the locus of “woke” is hopefully obvious.
Many Thanks!
>in my experience both as grantee and reviewer, grants are much more likely to get funded if the Broader Impacts are well integrated into the science itself, rather than just being a side project.
That makes sense.
>The reason this became law at all was due to scientifically illiterate congresspeople glancing at a grant for two seconds and raising hell about those dang scientists studying what fruit flies are attracted to.
Yeah. I remember Proxmire doing this. One of his "awards" was for a study of Peruvian potatoes. I don't know much about botany, but even _I_ know that if you want to look for potentially useful genes for a domesticated species, looking at the strains and wild relatives in place where it was first domesticated is a good bet.
I'm somewhat uncomfortable that the "Broader Impacts" are getting analyzed and justified at the granularity of individual grants. This sounds like the sort of analysis that should be done at a coarser level (e.g. "advance biology of cancer" or "advance physics of superconductors") with the broad justification done at the coarser level and the analysis of individual grants done with a tight focus on the scientific merit (exceptions for projects which are _specifically_ liaison efforts).
I think that’s a reasonable idea, but it requires a world in which taxpayers and politicians trust scientists not to waste money and don’t make them justify each thing they want to do to non-scientists. It looks like we’re moving away that world rather than towards it.
Many Thanks!
>It looks like we’re moving away that world rather than towards it.
Ouch! Not _horribly_ destructive, but unfortunate.
Every scientist has always complained about the “broader impact” and “outreach” portions of grants. Funding or killing projects because of them will make scientists waste even more time on them.
"Every scientist" is not overburdened by thrse requirements and they are generally not a time sink. A large percentage of flagship research institutions have public outreach organizations that work to support broader impact requirements. Stated plainly, these are "plug and play" programs that interact with undergraduate, high school, or middle school students. Speaking first hand, this is how STEM professionals keep the next generation excited about being I STEM, and many actually like seeing the general public being excited about their work.
As Scott pointed out in the examples from the database, it's including a sentence at the end of the abstract or single page that is copied and pasted in each grant application.
This whole culture war on woke is such a waste of time and energy. What the he'll is neo-marxism anyways? It sounds like political word salad for the shallow minded.
Many Thanks! Yeah, it makes sense to have _separate_ outreach organizations. The skill set to advance a scientific field, and to explain what one is doing to others _in the field_ is different from the skill set to explain all the links back to the top level goals that the public cares about and understands.
Is it sensible to occasionally make a special effort to attract women and minorities to science and engineering? Sure, to the extent that it's a countermeasure to peer/teacher pressure in high school that says women can't do math.
Is it sensible to encourage scientists receiving federal funding to do things that advance broader societal goals that they are uniquely able to accomplish? Sure.
Would I rather be able to just spend taxpayer money on whatever I thought was most important? You bet!
As another commenter noted, it's not* going to be a significant diversion of effort unless the lead investigator wants it to be, in which case they're doing something they want to do anyway.
*The exception would be federal grant programs that require a significant effort as a condition of the program. I personally think federal grant managers often bake too many constraints into their funding programs. I understand why they do it: they want to help shape science in a way that will do the most good and meet the most urgent needs (and also so they can tell Congress "look at these great initiatives we've developed").
But I prefer minimal constraints, for the benefit of science in general. I think ten scientists proposing their own best idea and plan is better than ten scientists proposing their best idea for tackling a pre-specified class of problems in a pre-specified way.
Many Thanks!
>But I prefer minimal constraints, for the benefit of science in general. I think ten scientists proposing their own best idea and plan is better than ten scientists proposing their best idea for tackling a pre-specified class of problems in a pre-specified way.
Agreed.
> I personally think federal grant managers often bake too many constraints into their funding programs.
That is my impression as well. I am concerned that, even if just 2% of the funds for a scientific research project go towards, e.g. minority outreach, I'd expect it to chew up a considerably larger fraction of time than just the 2%. Context switching eats time. Maintaining records for very different sets of activities eats time.
I also wouldn't expect the skills needed to drive a specialized STEMM area forward to have much of a match with e.g. minority outreach.
Being a professor is ALL context switching. Doing research, teaching a class, answering emails, answering questions from students, attending a meeting, reviewing a paper, is par for the course FOR A SINGLE DAY. Minority outreach at worst replaces a distraction rather than adding one.
Many Thanks! As a student, I'd only seen a very limited window on my professors' work days. Good point!
This sounds like what Scott said about his history homework; they were all supposed to put in a reflection on how they did the homework and what they had learned, and they all dutifully included how they had consulted various sources and learned about the complexity etc. etc. but in reality they just cribbed everything off Wikipedia.
>Expanding participation of women and individuals from underrepresented groups in STEM.
Notably, women *haven't* been underrepresented in STEM for a few decades now, depending how you cut the borders. Wildly overrepresented in everything biology-adjacent, underrepresented in math-adjacent.
The Broader Impacts get especially silly for pure math research. It would be within the NSF's rights to say "No, we will not fund math research with no known practical applications", but instead the status quo seems to be: yes you can get funded, but you must claim you are going to do K12/public/URM outreach at some point. Meanwhile, many math researchers are introverts who would really rather not do such a thing.
Of course, sometimes you can twist things. There's an old joke about a mathematician who submitted a grant proposal "Annihilating Radical Left Ideals", a topic in pure algebra that happens to sound like you're fighting communism.
Correct me if Im wrong, but this seems to require that grants aim at at least one of these ends, but not necessarily all of them. In the grant excerpts above, it seems that the scientists specifically chose to mouth the woke language, probably because they believed it was easiest or most effective. I think it's perfectly fair to incentive scientists to choose one or more of the other "broad goals" instead of the woke one.
Scott, you talk a lot about how policing the language police is important. Because losing words to them is the beginning of some sort of woke oppression. In that sense, while the non-woke studies should proceed, it might be useful to have them submit an appeal without the woke flair. That will discourage others from sprinkling woke nonsense in their abstracts, effectively liberating the scientific rhetoric from it.
Do you want to police language or not? It sounds like this is just replacing one language police “you must include one of the following words” with the other “you must not include any of the following words”. Both are equally bad. But canceling people for doing the wrong one is even worse than failing to get people started working.
But importantly: Cruz's list of 'woke' grants was only 10% of the grants awarded during that time period.
Scientists were not 'required' to include woke words in order to get funding from Biden, 90% of those who got funding did not do so!
Whereas in contrast, the other side is silencing *every* person who used woke words.
You bring a good point. I do think the woke enforcement of rules operates differently. There aren't hard rules, but you get cancelled if you break them. That's part of the annoyance. One has to be constantly walking on eggshells and double thinking before communicating. Explicit forbiddance is not a better solution, but I'm not sure it's necessarily less harmful.
🤷🏿♂️ maybe it's just because I'm a silly lib, but my assumption with all this stuff (extending to DOGE and beyond) is that they're intentionally shooting from the hip and have no issue with demonizing/shutting down things that are either borderline woke or not woke at all. Maybe similarly, Elon is claiming "fraud" about all kinds of govt activity that he doesn't like, regardless of whether there's fraud or not (my understanding is that he hasn't uncovered any real fraud at all, but if I'm wrong I hope someone lets me know).
We don't know the import of what he has 'uncovered' because none of it is reported with context. Or, in many cases, evidence. You can bray about some cringey 'line items' in a USAID accounting but unless you have a sense of *all* the expenditures and amounts in a year of USAID operation, it's just cherry picking. And you can be sure Elon won't release that , just as he didn't put the supposedly damning internal Twitter texts showing Biden 'censorship' of social media during COVID ( a story that Taibbi, Weiss, Greenwald ran with breathlessly) in context of *all* the messaging between them, which would have diluted the nefariousness angle considerably. (Another example: during the Obama era the GOP went full berserk when it emerged that the understaffed IRS was using heuristics -- keywords , like Musk is using now on grants -- to try to identify tax exempt nonprofits that were engaging in political activity. A limited tranche seemed to show targetting of right-wing groups, but examining the full range of the operation showed that left-wing groups were being targetted as well)
I think the clear solution here is to make sure everybody explains in future grant proposals how butch their science is and how it promotes traditional values.
(Note for future readers - at the time this would have read as sarcasm.)
Just put “Based” in each acronym. National Institute of Based Health.
Given that this is all really just branding, follow the leader and make all of your proposals be, like, "Make America Cancerless Again".
'Our cure for cancer will allow many sick women to leave their hospital beds and return to the kitchen.'
I don't think it's fair to just wave this away as "they were just playing the game by including woke shibboleths in their grant applications". I don't think it's good or should be acceptable for woke shibboleths to matter to a grant application, and any study funded by playing the game this way should absolutely be looked at. They got four years to benefit from this advantage over the alt-right fascist studies who forgot to include the one sentence about benefitting minorities, and now the pendulum swings the other way.
Here's the thing: the presence of this shibboleth says *nothing* about the politics of the grant applicants. Academics without tenure have to put up with this shit or leave academia. Those are the only two options. I doubt you consistently demand such purity tests in other domains.
No, they didn’t get four years of this. It’s been decades of gradually requiring more, starting at least with the Reagan administration requiring statements of broader impact. If the point is to end the language policing and cancel culture, you don’t do that by canceling people equally and oppositely - you do that by stopping the pendulum altogether and eliminating the broader impact statement.
"This seemed like a surprising failure mode"
It did? Really?
This seems like the least surprising failure mode imaginable. I can't quite claim to have predicted this in advance, since reading the headline of this post is the first I'd heard of said database. But to anyone who has paying a smidgeon of attention to how conservatives use and interact with the word "woke," it would be incredibly surprising to see any other outcome.
I wish I could say I expect this to be the crucial update that pushes you towards some long-overdue skepticism towards using "woke" as a word and as a concept, but alas I doubt it will happen. There *are* genuinely bad things that get associate with the word, and you *are* reasonable for pushing back against those things, and as long as there's a convenient handle it will still be easy enough to ignore the misuses of the term (which in the event, is *most* of the uses, as you have seen).
But I hope you'll at least take this opportunity to update on your view of the present government. Yes, it would have been easy to avoid this, for most people. They aren't most people. The sort of people who run the mental algorithms you're running here, where you actually look at the content and think about the effects and make a real effort to get it right: those aren't the people working on these things. Trump is, in fact, going to quite a bit of effort to get rid of people like that. The notion that the current administration was ever, EVER going to take the time (yes, even a few hours) to try to *understand* the things they were aiming to destroy of was not that plausible to begin with: still holding it after the last month seems ludicrous in the extreme.
> try to *understand* the things they were aiming to destroy
Why bother trying to understand anything? "Destroy all the things, look through the smoking rubble, rebuild those bits that in retrospect turn out to have been loadbearing" is what people voted for.
I disagree. Wokeness is basically a real thing, it’s bad, it’s good that the administration wants to reduce it, but it’s bad that they have such a high false positive rate. The problem can thus be summarized pretty straightforwardly.
If progressives want to be effective against the current administration, they have to give up on wokeness and stop trying to find ways to salvage it. That’s the surest way to undercut the admin’s raison d’etre.
Do you have a coherent definition of "wokeness" that allows you to make this assertion so confidently? Specifically, one that encapsulates all of what "anti-woke" people complain about, while still being self-evidently bad? I'd love to see it if so, I've been looking for one.
I'll second Fang's request. This sort of discussion would be quite a bit easier to have if we could work from a shared understanding of the key terms.
In the past week, I have heard that believing in anthropogenic global warming is woke, wishing to send aid to foreigners is woke, having a black actor play Captain America is woke, and that the KC Chiefs are woke. How many of these things fall under your definition of wokeness?
I’ve seen almost every bad thing - or thing the speaker or writer dislikes - included under the umbrella of socialism or fascism. I don’t think this implies those don’t exist. Yes, in politics, once a term develops a strong negative or positive connotation its use tends to expand dramatically. This isn’t proof it never existence.
I’m a bit incredulous that anyone who follows American politics is sincere when they say they don’t have an idea what it means.
I'm not arguing that wokeness exists, but to be honest, when I hear someone use it, I often don't know what it's referring to. So when you say "give up on wokeness and stop finding ways to salvage it", would that include PEPFAR? For e.g. Richard Hanania it wouldn't, for many of the people in his comment section it would.
In the context of this discussion, I don’t think it’s that difficult to get an idea of what it means. Basically affirmative action in grants or grants for research that promotes this worldview.
I also don’t think the false positives in this case are even mostly reflective of ambiguity of terminology. Most of the miscategorized grants were categorized this way because grant applicants added a sentence or two to their grants to appeal to standards no longer applied by the new administration, but which were seen as necessary or at least improving one’s chances with the previous one. So for the most part even this isn’t some inevitable consequence of the ambiguity of ‘wokeness.’
Thanks. Is PEPFAR a sort of affirmative action in grants? Or would that only be if it were a grant specifically for trans women to give out AIDS medication in needy areas?
I think a pretty obvious counter is that both "socialism" and "fascism" are ideas that historically have had proponents engaged in defining them as ideologies *under those names* and trying to put those ideologies into practice. Meanwhile "wokism" and "wokeness" are labels that are applied *almost entirely* from the outside. There was a transitional period where parts of the left used "woke" as a MUCH more narrow descriptor with entirely positive connotations[1]. But once the right took it up, spread it widely and started applying it to everything, pretty much all non-ironic usage on the left STOPPED. On the left, the word exists almost entirely as a joke. You will, ironically, find far, FAR more people who sincerely claim "socialism" as a fair description of their politics than would ever claim "wokism."
"I’m a bit incredulous that anyone who follows American politics is sincere when they say they don’t have an idea what it means."
I guarantee you that peoples' confusion on this point is genuine. Though it's not a matter of "not having an idea." It's a matter of having "far, far too many ideas." I believe you when you say that YOU have an idea what you mean when you use the term[2]. The trouble is that I DON'T believe that *your* usage is in any way *the* usage: I don't think there *is* one central, consistent meaning that informs all the usages. Imagine for a second that you're talking to Bob, who is one of those people who throws "fascism" and "fascist" around willy-nilly. If you heard Bob call something "fascist" could you fairly claim that you have *no idea* what Bob means by the word? Of course not: you could certainly get an approximate sense. But hearing Bob call things "fascist" would neither let you generalize to figure out what non-Bob people mean when using the word, nor would it give you much information at all about historical fascism. Now imagine that there *was no historical fascism*, that the words "fascist" and "fascism" had arisen organically out of everyday language in the past decade or two, and had its usage change considerably within the past six or seven years. You would, again, get *some* information from hearing Bob use the word "fascism." But even with a hundred Bobs to compare and contrast, you might not be able to generalize that to THE definitive meaning of "fascism;" both because that's rather hard to do, and because in this context there need not BE a "definitive meaning."
[1]In particular, it was a positive quality, but not the root of any sort of political viewpoint: you could call someone or something "woke," which (by standard linguistic construction) I suppose might have given it a quality of "wokeness." But "wokism" would have sounded incoherent, in much the same way that we don't generalize "politeness" or "wariness" to "politism" or "waryism."
[2] Well, mostly. I think it's very possible that if you interrogated your own sense of the word sufficiently you might find some inconsistencies.
Sure. I would describe it as the belief that it’s morally justified and necessary to discriminate against people - and promote prejudicial ideas - on the basis of race and sex in order to correct for ostensible race or sex-based wrongs either in the present or past. I don’t think that quite subsumes all of ‘wokeness,’ (e.g. I’d add a tenet that, to combat racism/sexism, it’s necessary to make exceptions to other erstwhile core liberal principles beyond non-discrimination) but I think that’s the core of it.
Pick whatever term you want for it, I don’t really care, but to pretend like this isn’t a phenomenon, especially to anyone that was around in the early 2020s, is just gaslighting imo.
OK, first let me say thank you for giving an actual answer. That allows for much more productive discussion than the "shut up, you know what it means" that I often see elsewhere. Second, let me say thank you for doing your best to make the definition reasonably clear and concise: that also makes for more productive discussion.
That being said, I definitely see some possible issues with it as a working definition. The main one being that the word "discriminate" is going to produce a lot of headaches here. I guarantee you that most of the people vocally engaged in various sorts of anti-racism DON'T consider anything they're doing to be discriminating or promoting discrimination in any way. Which means that as-stated, "the *belief* that it's..." is mostly going to lack any real referents. Those beliefs are pretty rare. Even if you try to rescue it by saying "the belief that [certain behaviors] are morally justified and necessary because..." (where [certain behaviors] are things you consider discriminatory) you've definitely left any personal intent to discriminate behind, and made a question about what "counts" as discrimination. Which I think is a much thornier question than you realize.
In case you haven't noticed the pitfalls, I'll ask you a simple question. Those signs on the bus that say that the front seats should be preferentially given to people who are pregnant, disabled or have mobility issues: are those discrimination? If yes, why? If no, also why? I notice that *I* don't really have a good answer, and feel like I could pick apart any simple argument for either "yes" or "no" in a heartbeat. I mean, they're obviously giving some people preferential treatment. But they're also not doing it arbitrarily or capriciously and calling it "preferential" actually makes some pretty deep assumptions.
"Pick whatever term you want for it, I don’t really care, but to pretend like this isn’t a phenomenon, especially to anyone that was around in the early 2020s, is just gaslighting imo."
I'm not pretending anything. I'm aware that there's SOMETHING that has gotten many conservatives--and a decent number of non-conservatives--just absolutely hopping mad over the past decade and change. But attempts to interrogate what that "something" is have consistently produced more confusion than clarity. The details seem to shift a lot from one account to the next. I, too, often feel like I'm being gaslit here, but by people constantly insisting that it's totally clear and obvious what they mean when it absolutely is not. And I'm not alone in this: as far as I can tell THE dominant view of "wokeness" among young-ish, online, vaguely-leftist sorts is that the word as its used today is almost meaningless: it basically means "anything a conservative doesn't like." I'm not saying this with malice or even anger: I do find the phenomenon irritating sometimes, but more than that I find it quite curious.
I think discrimination is easy to define. E.g. if you're accounting for a person's race when deciding whether to hire them, you're engaging in racial discrimination. If you were to substitute 'white' or 'male' for 'black' or 'female', respectively, and you would call it discrimination, then it's discrimination. I'm skeptical that people who support such policies *really* don't intend to discriminate frankly. It's just that discrimination is seen as a dirty word and it's more strategic to redefine morally loaded words around their preferred exceptions than admit that their opinion is that in some cases a generally bad thing is actually good.
I didn't include disability or pregnancy in my definition so I'm not following the relevance. If you're leftish, then you probably agree with the idea that discrimination based on race and sex are bad, in general, no? When discussing discrimination against groups of people you strictly oppose discrimination against, you would probably find things less ambiguous, irrespective of the intent of the one doing the discrimination.
What I suspect may be going on here is that to most progressives, certain discriminatory policies or attitudes toward e.g. white people, males, Asians in some cases, follow logically from the same progressive principles that justify welfare or environmental policy or civil equality, so the idea that the former can or should be logically unbundled from the latter and singled out for objection seems odd or arbitrary. And since even unrelated political positions are strongly correlated, it's natural even if illogical to bundle unrelated positions together for proponents and opponents alike.
"I think discrimination is easy to define."
The obvious retort would be "perhaps you think it's easy to define because you've never been confronted with a situation where it wasn't." Or rather more bluntly "perhaps you think it's easy to define because you've never had to grapple with it up close and personal." I don't know you or know anything about you, so I'm NOT actually going to make either of those claims. But I will make the (still rather blunt) claim that you probably have no actually put much serious thought into the matter, and especially that you probably haven't read very widely on the topic. There is a wealth of complexity there that you (apparently) simply don't see. For example:
"I didn't include disability or pregnancy in my definition so I'm not following the relevance."
The relevance is that they play havoc with your nice, neat definition of discrimination. They play havoc with it in a way that ought be pretty easy to see, which makes them useful for testing one's intuition.
Let's take another example: hiring discrimination and pregnancy. Your definition: "if you take a person's pregnancy into account when deciding whether to hire them, you're engaging in discrimination." Let's work with that.
First we need to know what it means to NOT take it into account. If you hire completely blind, looking only at resumes, stripped of any information that could indicate correlates of pregnancy (such as age, gender or marital status)[1] is that a sufficient condition to avoid discrimination based on pregnancy? It should be, right? Hold on, but someone being pregnant isn't just a box they tick on a form (that you can just leave off), it has real, measurable impacts on somebody's job availability. What if you're hiring for extra, short-term programmers to hit a production deadline that's coming up in six months. Isn't it, well, rather important that the person you will be available full-time three, four and five months from now?
Of course, you can just put that in the job requirements. "Must be available full-time for the next six months with no vacation or leave." But then you ARE "taking a person's pregnancy into account," you're just doing it in a way that puts the onus on them to self-select out of your applicant pool, rather than removing them yourself. And of course, it's not the pregnancy itself, merely an unavoidable effect of the pregnancy. But the result is the same: this group of people is significantly less able to get hired at your job.
I'm not even claiming the above paragraph is a bad or unreasonable way to handle it: reality imposes constraints and you DO have to work around them. But I will be *very* disappointed if you try to weasel out of the obvious conclusion by claiming that's not "really" discrimination. Quite clearly it is, by your own definition. You had to take a certain factor (ability to work) into account when hiring somebody. That made certain people (people in the middle of a pregnancy) effectively ineligible to be hired.
I could type more. I could probably fill a dozen pages with examples of situations where "don't take X into account when hiring somebody" is either functionally impossible or would result in a broken hiring process, for almost any X you can imagine. But I'd rather see how you respond to what I've already written and if it results in any clarifications or updates to your thinking.
[1] Which I'll note is actually quite hard to do/
" I'm skeptical that people who support such policies *really* don't intend to discriminate frankly."
I'm skeptical that you have any idea how people who you consider "woke" actually think. I think the entire thread about your writing about such people betrays a very superficial understanding of how *they* think and talk about such issues. I'm actually quite strongly reminded of how I see people on the left talk about "tech bros" sometimes: the same very un-nuanced, very homogenized broad strokes that makes a very simplistic attempt to model a very heterogeneous (and generally poorly defined) group. It shows very little awareness of what discourse *within* these groups actually looks like, or how complex some of the ideas under discussion *actually are.*
In the same way people complained about "political correctness gone mad" 20 years ago, the way the term is often used subsumes a lot more beyond this such as environmental issues.
While it would definitely be pretty easy to sort through these, perhaps there are some procedural reasons to just cut everything that even barely mentions something woke.
Even an executive order can’t do things like violate equal protection, and I imagine there would be some pretty angry lawsuits if there was some arbitrary cutoff of wokeness, that probably placed certain demographics in higher promotions in the woke camp compared to those who were technically woke, but still got away with it.
Maybe cutting it all makes the process simple, easy, and not requiring any arbitrary human judgement.
As somebody who has never looked at grant text before, I had the exact option response to this. The list is true! Almost every grant, if taken literally, is woke and promises to implement DEI in some form.
I don't think think saying "they lied to get the grant" is that much of a consolation either.
Why would someone putting in a couple sentences say they care about students of color be a reason to think their cancer research isn’t worth funding? I thought this administration was claiming that racist tweets are no reason to cancel someone, so why should including a racist sentence in a grant application be a reason to cancel them?
None of the sentences are "we care." They are "we care an outsized amount and promise to give special treatment".
It's not remotely "cancellation" or equivalent if you care to actually think about it for one second. When I first read the uproar I assumed it was (e.g. Marxist professors getting funding for XYZ). But instead no, it's actually straight up government-funded DEI promises (however insincere they may be).
Wait, did you just say that canceling someone’s funding is not literally cancelation? What do you think those words mean?
Everything you say is true, but to me it’s even worse: by Ted Cruz’s own lights, scientists forced to include DEI boilerplate in order to get grants ought to be considered *victims* of the woke regime. Why on earth would you re-victimize the victims? Rather than demonstrating the superiority of your new regime by showing how the victims will now be treated so much better?
Because the goal is not to get these victims to like you, it's to scapegoat them.
I'm not sure there's much thought about the victims either way. The new administration is guided mostly by the beauty of their weapons.
This is a very good point.
> Why on earth would you re-victimize the victims?
Because punishing people is an absolute blast.
Cruelty is the point.
If Trump required grant-applicants to explain how their research helped whites, would you call scientists who applied for those grants victims? When the next administration cancelled those grants would you defend the scientists? I doubt it.
I doubt it because you already understand that if scientists mouthed the words “my research is good because it especially helps whites” it would dignify and reinforce the idea that special favor for whites is good, and you find that idea repugnant. Indeed, you probably would consider those scientists at best cowards and at worst evil.
The reason people think scientists who mouthed woke phrases are victims is because either (1) for class or ideological reasons they see wokeness as generally reasonable or (2) they instinctively believe that the role of left-liberals is to exercise power while the role of conservatives is to merely check power and therefore it is reasonable for “neutrals” to follow left-liberal trends.
Those in category (1) are philosophically and morally wrong.
Those in category (2) need to be taught a lesson. I want our system’s functionaries – the lawyers, teachers, government workers, corporate VPs, scientists – to feel in their bones that the political pendulum does not swing from the left to the middle, but rather from the left to the right. That if you mouth left-liberal orthodoxies under one administration, you’ll lose your funding under the next.
In particular, I want scientists to be so fearful, angry, and annoyed by this phenomenon that they lobby Congress to remove any requirement that they mouth woke phrases; that they lobby the next Democratic administration not to offer grants that require woke phrases. And if even their lobbying efforts fail, I want them to think extra-hard before applying for grants that require woke pretensions and I want them to put considerable emotional effort into toning down any woke language they do mouth.
I realize this will cause individual pain for functionaries who have (quite reasonably!) assumed that mouthing woke ideology is safe. But I care more about the social good of defeating those ideas than their individual pain.
Yes, you're right. I do find the idea of discrimination meant to rectify past monstrous injustices, infinitely more intellectually and morally defensible than the idea of discrimination meant to entrench the injustices even further ... even if the former ALSO turns out to create more problems than it solves and probably, usually be a bad idea.
"Rectifying past injustices" was the justification for affirmative action in the 70s. As you already know, the current justification is "diversity" (fewer whites and men makes us stronger) and "systemic racism" (faith that massive, but invisible racism explains disparities in group outcomes).
To the extent any scientist agrees with you 60 years after civil rights, they are not victims, but rather purposefully blind or more likely masking some other ideology.
To the extent any scientist merely mouthed woke words, they are not victims, but cowards who apparently must be taught by fear to understand that the Right can also wield power.
To a first approximation, my party is whichever party talks to the scientists doing productive science in a less menacing tone. That party obviously isn’t yours.
But not really, right? Because you've already said that you would support "menacing" scientists who sought grants expressly to help white people and men.
You're using "science" to shield your more basic opinion that discriminating against whites and men is fine, but discriminating against "underrepresented minorities" and women is wrong.
There’s the thing: you could *imagine* woke bureaucrats telling me that I need to be defunded, effectively chased out of science, to punish me for my sins as a white male. But they never did. A few crazies on the Internet said that, but the bureaucrats were happy to fund my quantum computing research if I said “I like diversity and want to support a diverse group of students” (wildly controversial, I know) — and then went on recruit the best students of whatever background I could find. *You*, and those in the Trump administration who think like you, are the first people who’ve ever credibly threatened to defund me for failing to toe their political line.
> the idea of discrimination meant to rectify past monstrous injustices
Taken at face value, this is a statement in support of the new regime ruthlessly punishing everyone who sided with the old "woke" one, in order to rectify the injustices it inflicted on its enemies now with the power to get payback.
But of course, you don't mean that. There is no principle here beyond the friend–enemy distinction: if it benefits your side, it's a morally defensible correction, and if it benefits the enemy at your expense, it's a monstrous injustice.
"In particular, I want scientists to be so fearful, angry, and annoyed..."
In this, at least, you seem perfectly in-line with the current administration. A lot of us instead want the scientists to be...wait for it...DOING SCIENCE. That's the entire purpose of science funding, to have scientists doing science, because you value science as a source of knowledge.
When somebody adds some silly political cruft to the grant-application processes, they are moving things in the wrong direction[1] in a real but fairly minor way. Maybe it's for noble reasons, maybe it's for bad ones, but either way they should stop. But when you say "scientists need to be crushed until the FALL IN LINE (with my particular politics)" you're not even *pretending* to make a noble mistake, or a reasonable request or to value science at all. You're simply wanting to exert power over people for the sake of exerting power.
[1] Though notice that the requirement these stem form has seemingly been there for decades and is only now getting this sort of response.
I'll ask the same question to you that I asked above: if the scientists in question had written "my research will especially help whites and men" in order to satisfy some "silly political cruft," would you shrug and call it minor?
Emphatically, yes. It would be minor. Again, whoever added the "silly political cruft" requirement to the process was probably doing bad work and reversing that work seems reasonable. But why on Earth would I get mad at scientists trying to get grants for following the process laid out for them to get grants? Why on Earth would I want the scientists to become "fearful, angry and annoyed" at following the requirements *other people* set on their jobs? Why on Earth would I want them to spend untold time and effort on "lobbying congress" instead of doing science?
Science funding is political because all funding is political, that's unavoidable. But actively trying to make the process *more* about politics--especially in deliberately divisive ways--and *less* about science is B-A-D.
As a side note, when we're talking about science, I don't think there are *nearly* as many people as you imagine who consider research that "especially helps whites" or "especially helps men" to be an inherently bad thing. I certainly don't. Doubtless there are some because you for any stupid position you can imagine, somebody holds it. But I doubt you've actually thought through what that looks like.
What would "science that especially helps whites" look like? Skin cancer research? R&D on better sunblock? Who exactly is protesting these things? Certainly not me.
Meanwhile "science that especially helps men," is a field well enough established that it has a name, journals, clinics, you name it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrology
Is anyone protesting the latest in andrology research? Probably somebody, but certainly not me. They're not getting much press if they are.
It seems like you may be confusing science with politics. The reason that *political* initiatives focused specifically on "helping white men" get such push back is because for a very large chunk of U.S. history that's what nearly ALL politics was about. The people who push back against initiatives like that now largely[1] do so because they think the disparities that were *deliberately* being created through most of U.S. history still have significant lingering effects today. Not, in general, because of some hatred toward white people and/or men (though again, see footnote [1]). It's reasonable to disagree with them on that set of empirical observations about the world, but if you think that their belief system regards "things that improve the lives of white men" as *inherently* bad, you simply do not understand that bit of reality very well.
[1] Necessary disclaimer, no group is a monolith.
"the political pendulum does not swing from the left to the middle, but rather from the left to the right."
Wow, you can't make this stuff up. When has the political pendulum in the U.S. EVER swung "from left to middle?" Look at the past 25 years: how many under Republican presidents? How many under Democrats? What about the makeup of congress over that time? What about the Supreme court? What about major long-term policy items, like the military budget, the distribution of the tax burden, the aggregated size of well-fare programs? Perhaps I hallucinated the past quarter-century, but I seem to remember the right getting its way *quite often* during that time period.
I suspect that your issue has far less to do with politics and more to do with culture. The culture of large parts of the U.S. HAS shifted over the decades in ways that (I assume) you strongly dislike. But culture doesn't flow from the government to the people. The vast, vast, VAST majority of culture comes from what people do on their own, outside the spaces where government happens.
I'd wager that you'd find the cultural makeup of most scientific fields not to your liking. But the reasons for that have (as far as I can tell, having spent quite a lot of my life in the relevant spaces) very little to do with any government policy, and everything to do with who values academics and how they relate to others[1]. I absolutely guarantee you that having a conservative government deliberately try to make working scientists "fearful, angry and annoyed" is going to do exactly NOTHING to shift the cultural makeup of the sciences in the direction you want. Quite the opposite.
[1] Though I'd venture a guess that having one of the two major political parties categorically reject the legitimate conclusions of a major area of science for literal decades has done conservatives no favors there. But note despite the connection to politics, the underlying mechanism is still cultural rather than legal.
If this theory is correct, the more pressing question is what scientists should do about the current administration’s new dogmas, since the next progressive administration will punish them for adhering to conservative dogmas. So if a scientist mouths the anti-woke phrase “gulf of America” or “LGB” under this administration, they’ll lose their funding under the next. What is a scientist to do?
It’s true that one way out of this is to lobby congress to not need to mouth any phrases, but that includes both the hypothetical woke phrases of the next administration and the actual free-speech stifling that trump is engaging in. For some reason you only focus on the woke side.
I don't know enough about the US grant process to say whether Cruz has the right approach, but I'd bet that a supermajority of grantees have been lifelong Dem voters. Hard to call them victims of the woke regime when they've actively supported it
So anything Democrat is "woke" now? Asking because I keep trying to nail down the term to a coherent meaning, with little success.
FWIW I'd wager that a clear majority of the grantees NOT on Cruz's list are also Dem voters. My overall impression is that liberal and left cultural spaces almost always hold academic careers in high regard, while many conservative cultural spaces disdain them, with predictable results for the makeup of various fields.
That question doesn't follow. Not all Dem policies are woke, but all woke policies are Dem. If you vote for the Dems, you're voting for woke policies as well as others. That's the nature of big tent parties
And no, you're not asking because you're trying to nail down the term; you're asking as a rhetorical tool to try to score points on an online comments section. I'm not playing that overdone word game. You know what woke means, I know what woke means, and the host of this blog knows what woke means
>FWIW I'd wager that a clear majority of the grantees NOT on Cruz's list are also Dem voters. My overall impression is that liberal and left cultural spaces almost always hold academic careers in high regard, while many conservative cultural spaces disdain them, with predictable results for the makeup of various fields.
There's good reason to believe you have the causation backwards. Academia's leftward drift began long before the polarization in public attitudes towards it
"You know what woke means, I know what woke means, and the host of this blog knows what woke means"
NO I DAMN WELL DON'T. I'll thank you kindly to not tell me what I do and don't know. Apparently you *don't* know that's rude and dishonest, but you certainly should.
Everybody who's strongly against "woke" and is ABSOLUTELY SURE that it has a clear and coherent meaning and that anybody who claims otherwise is lying. And when I start to ask questions--to the extent that people are willing to answer at all--y'alls meaning are ALL DIFFERENT.
I've got a pretty good memory. I could list a bunch of things that woke means *to different people.* There would be some agreements among the lists, and also quite a lot of disagreements.
The closest thing to a *coherent* hypothesis I have for what people mean by the word is that they use pejoratively it to indicate Blue Tribe Cultural Signifiers. But since everyone has a different sense of what's bad, and a different sense of what, exactly is a Blue Tribe Cultural Signifier, that leads to a semantic mess of usage.
Scott (et al.!), there's another problem. Years ago, I was asked to review a Canadian grant proposal - it was delightful with exactly the right people, save one. She was not in the field and not very good in her own. All 3 reviewers voted to reject but asked to accept it if they ditched the weak link. Apparently, some (all?) agencies could not approve a grant unless it had at least 1 female - not written down, btw.
Another issue is some agencies do not vet the science part and accept things like "my lived experience overrides your hard data." If you can weed out the crap methodology, wouldn't that help?
A possible positive? Some agencies here and abroad demand that grant-seekers explicitly share their expectations of the impact on practice and policy which (to me anyway) is a good thing, if done right. (One thing I'm seeing in grants and especially startup pitches is mentioning which SDG(s) this project will advance. I haven't seen anyone get pissy over that).
Thanks!
Not trying to be difficult, and I'm sure there's lots of context I don't get, but I cannot comprehend how a situation in which a grant was worth accepting *if one person was kicked off* could exist. Is the idea that she is so bad that she will exercise a kind of anti-expertise? That seems like a strong claim.
Part of our remit was to assess the ability of the team to do the work. There can't be a weak link. She was going to get paid a lot of money and clearly would not contribute, so the funder could just cut that chunk of salary (and travel support and clerical support) but that opens the door to backlash. We liked the project but in a hypercompetitive setting., applicants' first job is to not get culled on the first round by the reviewers. Having a weaker team is not a good thing :)
Thanks for the nudge, @Philosophy Bear!
Ahh right, that makes sense.
The requirement that every grant has a woman on it is a bit of an odd overreach because in a heavily gender-skewed field, and with a small team, gives very little evidence of ill will, and even a positive attempt at inclusion can come up short.
Additionally claims [0] made that the number of Woke/DEI grants increased from 2021 to 2022 (by implausible margins, 0%->16%) were caused by the full grant text not being available on the web in 2021 and then available in 2022...[1]. A basic sanity check could find these sorts of things...
[0]https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1844209151406202993
[1] https://x.com/TrevorVossberg/status/1856226251289006198
I am a scientist who has received funding from NSF, among other agencies.
I agree very strongly with this post. Thankfully my grants didn't make this particular list, but under the old system it was very much encouraged to talk up any chances that you might help out minorities etc. Most scientists do think it would be good to help minorities and try to do so when the opportunity presents itself, but it's not our main job and most people just added some boilerplate to make the proposals look good.
I am in the 'business' of selling scientific research to the government. The government said they wanted me to emphasize anything I might do to help minorities, and so I did that. Now they don't want me to, so okay I won't. I mostly want to do science. I am good at it and it is my contribution to "making America great".
The comments saying "well just don't fund them this time so they'll stop doing that" are depressing for two reasons. First, it seems egregiously unfair to set out some rules, people follow those rules, then you change the rules and accuse the people who followed them of bad behavior. You're the one who changed the rules! Second, these comments assume that we have other resources - we do not. If my funding runs out, then I'm unemployed and it's the end of my career as a scientist. I think people are imagining scientists as very well off people, but it's actually a fairly precarious insecure position and doesn't pay especially well. People mostly do it because they enjoy the intellectual challenge of it and because it is a rewarding to use ones talents to contribute to the store of human knowledge and is a benefit to society.
The new wisdom that it’s self evidently bad to want to help minorities or women seems a lot worse than some „woke“ boilerplate. What happened to „free speech“? The problem with woke was that it was causing a lot of hypocrisy and people resented having to be performative. But most Americans actually agree with the basic premise that it’s good to help people who were dealt a shitty hand at birth.
It strains credulity to imagine that being born as a black person or woman in the United States is being given a bad hand
Do you think it is a more privileged position than being born a straight white make in the United States?
My guess is that the average black child born today is at most a moderately less privileged position than the comparable white child. The average girl born today probably has a better position than the average boy.
*the key here is comparing only Americans
Didn't JD Vance say that the only relevant group to compare to is other Americans? Our duty is to other Americans not to people in other countries, so, to be consistent, those other people should be excluded from these comparisons.
JD Vance says many things, that was certainly one of them.
It's less privileged in any meaningful sense than being born a woman in the US. https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/rise-of-the-matriarchy
I read this whole thing waiting for you to get to your defense of why the U.S. is a matriarchy only to reach the last paragraph, where you called your headline "provocative" and said you really wished that "matriarchy" and "patriarchy" were used less.
Of course it is. Look at the ratio of people falsely claiming to be black to those falsely claiming to be white.
Do you have those numbers? Black people trying to “pass” as white are pretty common, but I’m only aware of one white person who has ever claimed to be black.
Whose credulity? Maybe in daily life there isn't much difference for some people, but when it comes to things such as the likelihood of being pulled over by a cop, the likelihood of being arrested, injured or killed as a result of that traffic stop I'd call that a bad hand. There are still persistent wage gaps of -87% and -84% respectively. The historical odds of serving as president are 2 in 67 (if i counted the member of presidential terms correctly) for black people and 0 in 67 for women. You and i might disagree about what constitutes "moderately".
Comparing groups of Americans to other groups of Americans yields some differences sure, but I would not generally describe them as being dealt a bad hand by life.
That title has to be reserved for people born in exceptionally bad circumstances, like the huge percentage of people born in extreme poverty across the world.
Do you also oppose your local soup kitchen on the grounds that it's helping hungry but well-off Americans rather than even more impoverished people in other countries? This seems like an isolated demand for rigor.
I'm not that extreme, but a part of me does feel like those are wastes of time all things considered. It's not really an isolated demand for rigor because all charities are not equal and some are more effective than others.
For women, they are advantaged in that they face less violence, less punishment for the same crimes, have easier admissions into schools, preference in hiring, have favorable divorce laws, and don’t have to work as much for the same consumption level.