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NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with executive orders

matthewdgreen

As context, the NSF requires grant writers to include a “broader impacts” section [1] in every grant proposal. This includes things like improving education, national security, economic competitiveness, and also inclusion - for example, ideas to attract more talent from underrepresented groups. So every NSF proposer works hard to satisfy the NSF on this requirement. I happen to think that these are worthwhile goals (we shouldn’t be wasting our limited talent due to historical crankiness) and simultaneously I believe the sections ends up being a bit performative. If the NSF were to change its criteria for grants going forward I might disagree with that approach but it would be consistent with what I’ve heard from these folks, ie they think “DEI” is getting in the way of science. However: the current approach is just destructive: if involves asking researchers to augment their proposals with these goals, and then retroactively refuses to pay already-awarded grant recipients who did what they were asked to.

I will leave the question of whether this is constitutional to other folks. I will even leave aside the question of whether we can afford to defund science in our current crazy geopolitical environment. The real point here is that this is just plain wrong.

[1] https://new.nsf.gov/funding/learn/broader-impacts

moyix

I'm a bit confused, or maybe I've been doing it wrong. DEI-related things don't usually go in Broader Impacts, do they? When I've written grants, Broader Impacts was just generally for "how is your research going to help society?"; it was the Broadening Participation in Computing section that was oriented toward DEI.

matthewdgreen

You're right, and also it's both. Broader Impacts covers "increasing and including the participation of women, persons with disabilities and underrepresented minorities in STEM" as an option, but BPC covers this more explicitly. I really doubt that the people implementing this policy care that much.

sega_sai

I think broader impact section is good. Whether it should be weighted as high as it was is up to debate. I personally think it was becoming too important for the success of the proposal.

But obviously the new administration is not interested in any sort of nuanced debate, but rather ideological purge.

anon946

I agree that the goals are worthwhile, and also feel that requiring every proposal to include this is not efficient and/or very effective. They should take all the funds and time spent on this every year as part of every award, and just fund programs specifically designed to attract inner-city kids to science, or funnel talented, low-income, high school students to be mentored, taught advanced classes, etc.

I would be happy to spend time mentoring URM, etc. But it'd work a lot better if others managed such a program, thought about how to attract them, etc. Specialization is good.

eli_gottlieb

>They should take all the funds and time spent on this every year as part of every award, and just fund programs specifically designed to attract inner-city kids to science, or funnel talented, low-income, high school students to be mentored, taught advanced classes, etc.

Or just have pay for decent, functional K-12 schools in non-rich districts without housing bubbles?

mrguyorama

>just fund programs specifically designed to attract inner-city kids to science, or funnel talented, low-income, high school students to be mentored, taught advanced classes, etc.

And how do you find out which programs successfully do that without studying them?

The magic of "just" in a suggestion I guess.

daveguy

That seems like a reasonable middle ground to me. But I didn't have any problem with DEI. If you have inner-city kids underrepresented by 50% then fund according to %population * %underrepresnted -- if 25% population then 12.5% of funding for programs to increase participation (don't think it would be that high). Maybe divide that by N if you have N different groups you would like to be more represented (eg rural kids). Performance is just that. Funding would be more effective. I expect anti-DEI folks would like the funding effort even less than the performance effort. It's obvious they believe diversity itself is part of the problem (whether admitted or not).

exe34

> they believe diversity itself is part of the problem (whether admitted or not).

they admit it. President Trump stated unambiguously that the recent crash and tragic loss of life is due to DEI hires, even though all the pilots and air traffic controllers involved were able-bodied white (presumably heterosexual and cis-gendered) men.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpvmdm1m7m9o

> Asked by a reporter how he could blame diversity programmes for the crash when the investigation had only just begun, the president responded: "Because I have common sense."

gnfargbl

Do you have any thoughts (which you feel comfortable sharing) on the actual effectiveness or otherwise of these initiatives? Setting aside the dogma on both sides, do they achieve their stated aims?

rbanffy

It's difficult to isolate the effects of DEI - there are far too many confounding factors interfering. You might use effective masking when analyzing a submission that removes your own personal biases, but, after the hire, there is no way to hide the difference that could have impacted your assessment.

Keeping biases in check is a daily exercise. I am aware of many of my own biases and I have to continuously fight back. There are people whose company I enjoy more than others, but I can't let that interfere with my professional judgment.

gnfargbl

I agree that there's not much information to be gathered from a small sample, but there ought to be some tangible effects at the macro level. Is academia actually becoming more equal due to these initiatives? Are researchers who are hired as a result of inclusivity programmes as effective as researchers who are hired outside those programmes? These are things we ought to be able to measure.

creer

For the project managers, it's probably wrong both ways (in wasted time, efficiency, competence) plus wrong some more at every change. Don't throw away your paperwork: much of the current change will be challenged in court so proposals might need changing a couple times. And then again in 4 years.

jibal

When this administration says "DEI", then mean "anyone who isn't a cishet white male".

elashri

Without going into the discussion about polarized points. I have some observations

1- NSF budget is about 10 billions, I always had in mind that it is much more. That's about 0.17% of the total federal budget. If we include DOE R&D funding and NIH we will get to 1%. This is the funding for most of research in science in the US. Seems like not a great area to achieve huge reduction in deficit.

2- Even if we ignore the whole point of DEI and say that we need to end support for some of the projects. You do take your time and evaluate projects that needs to take action. You don't stop all the funding and pause critical support for projects and cause huge problems on medium and long term. And it also hurt the reputation of the country and its competitiveness.

3- The current NSF director was actually appointed by the current setting president in his first term.

flanked-evergl

This does not hurt the reputation of the US.

HelloNurse

Suppose you are a scientist. Would you be interested in USA grants and universities as career options? Certainly much less than last year.

rbanffy

I know it's a rhetorical question, but, at this point, I don't even want to visit the US.

terrabiped

I fail to see why a scientist won’t be interested in the grant now. Maybe if you’re talking about some areas like social sciences, yes, but for everything else not much seems to have changed.

greentxt

The media coverage of it does.

flanked-evergl

In whose eyes? Iran's? Russia's? China's?

null

[deleted]

thrwawy1234

I will not miss the “DEI” components of NSF proposals (or the PIER part of the DOE ones), especially having been on the review panel side about 5 times now. It’s not that I disagree with their intent, but the fact that after you’ve read a few you realize that proposers know exactly what they are expected to write there, so they write that there. Those sections are basically a useless going-through-the-motions exercise, and everyone knows it. I’ve never seen a proposal win or lose, or even change positions in a tie break, based on that content. More or less we just look to see that it exists, indicate that existence in the review form, and concentrate on the actual content. It’s a performative waste of everyone’s time.

strangeloops85

This is disingenuous: there is no "DEI" component of NSF proposals. There is a Broader Impacts section which is mandated by law - the America Competes Act of 2010, which congress passed. https://www.congress.gov/111/plaws/publ358/PLAW-111publ358.p... It states that:

GOALS.—The Foundation shall apply a Broader Impacts Review Criterion to achieve the following goals: (1) Increased economic competitiveness of the United States. (2) Development of a globally competitive STEM workforce. (3) Increased participation of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM. (4) Increased partnerships between academia and industry. (5) Improved pre-K–12 STEM education and teacher development. (6) Improved undergraduate STEM education. (7) Increased public scientific literacy. (8) Increased national security.

That's it. I've won many NSF proposals and have never talked about DEI. Instead we talk about outreach work we do with local schools, our involving undergraduate students in research who would not otherwise be able to volunteer their time, and of course the economic impacts of working on these topics.

An executive order cannot override the law authorizing the National Science Foundation and its activities. We are, for now, a country of laws.

chriskanan

A recent Major Research Instrumentation proposal that I submitted to NSF had this required section in the Broader Impacts section [1], where I've pasted the text from the instructions:

Institutional Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion - Using no more than one paragraph, describe indicators of institutional commitment to promoting diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) within the awardee/subawardee institution(s).

[1] https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/mri-major-research...

jjtheblunt

Is the item (3) what the parent comment refers to?

strangeloops85

Who knows? The executive orders read like they were written by children and don't clearly define what they mean by "DEIA". But NSF's authorization is from Congress. Unless congress passes a law rescinding this as a part of what counts as broader impacts, or the Supreme Court rules that increasing participation of underrepresented groups is unconstitutional (by precedent it is certainly not!), then NSF cannot simply change the definition of broader impacts.

floor2

> I’ve never seen a proposal win or lose, or even change positions in a tie break, based on that content

This is an absolutely wild statement, because my experience has been the complete opposite. I've seen a zillion times where a straight white guy was passed over specifically to achieve DEI goals.

I don't think the pro-DEI crowd understands how discriminatory DEI initiatives became in many institutions and how that's the root of the anti-DEI backlash.

I've lost count of the number of times I've seen the best X (candidate, project, company, whatever) get rejected because they were unacceptably white and male, so that the job/grant/contract could go to a DEI candidate instead.

Heck, I was on an interview committee where the recruiters and hiring manager openly admitted they weren't interviewing male candidates, and we spent 3 months interviewing 100% of female candidates who applied while hundreds of male applicants got ghosted. That one was more explicit than most, but the same phenomenon has been happening for years at every layer of academia, business and government.

advisedwang

The post your are talking about is specifically about NSF proposals. Your experience with interviewing, project choice, contracting or whatever you are referring to is a different thing. It's not so wild to imagine that a different thing has different practices.

maxlybbert

I think you’re talking about something different.

Regardless of which ethnic group, sexual orientation, nationality, etc. I belong to, if I want to get an NSF grant, I have to fill out certain paperwork. And, apparently, it’s expected that I would write how my proposal will make the world a better place based on how it impacts DEI factors. The comment is that it doesn’t actually matter what I say there, since everybody says the same thing. There’s never a case where the NSF isn’t sure about whether to grant funds, and then decides that the way one project impacts DEI makes it better than another project.

Cumpiler69

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vkou

[flagged]

squigz

I've never found this argument of the anti-DEI crowd to be very convincing, because it inherently implies that without DEI measures, such decisions would be entirely meritocratic.

prepend

I think the argument is that while there was suspicion and implicit lack of meritocratic procedures before the initiatives, after doubt was removed.

For example, I just started in the 90s and worked in tech but I never heard an HR person or hiring manager say “we’re only going to interview applicants of a majority race” but after initiatives, it became common to hear this toward an underrepresented race or gender.

I want a diverse workforce. But explicitly discriminating to attempt to fix the problem is a bad way that makes people angry. I think it’s better to work on systemic fixes (more graduates, more training programs, etc).

floor2

Perhaps it would help if you considered concepts like "more and less".

Without DEI measures (as implemented by many American institutions in recent years) such decisions would be more meritocratic.

There's still nepotism and rich parents and connections and luck and a whole bunch of random biases by the people making decisions. The point is that while in theory DEI was supposed to be a counter to those forces, in practice it has just become another source of unfairness and injustice.

gtirloni

If you couldn't see the anti-China rhetoric was a smoke screen, now it should be pretty obvious, with the US going down a similar road (eg. vetting projects that goes against the government's ideology... which is ironically what most far right politicians say they are against: ideology).

panic

This type of political movement always claims to be against the exact things they’re for. They claim to be against censorship while using their actual influence to do things like forcing TikTok to change their moderation policy. They claim to want to protect children while putting child abusers in positions of power. It gives members of the movement an easy way to deflect criticism and express their feelings of grievance—don’t you know we hate censorship, and anyway it’s you who was censoring us! It’s only fair for you to feel a little of that pain that we feel!

malfist

It's not that hard to understand. Their view point is that there must be a class of citizens that the laws protect, but do not bind, and a class of citizens that the laws bind but do not protect.

Nothing more than feudalism 2.0

sdenton4

Zuckerberg coming out strong for free speech, and then sending employees who push back on anti-DEI policy changes to HR...

Free speech if you're a billionaire.

outside1234

They are against censorship of THEM not censorship of YOU

eadmund

I suspect that projects are always vetted against ideology, because everyone has one and everyone believes that his own is correct. I doubt that one could get NSF funding for a study of racial differences in IQ. I am certain that one could not get it for any ‘research’ based on the idea that the Earth is 7,000 years old. That seems like a really good thing!

I think the news is less that a branch of the executive is complying with executive branch policy, and more that it’s surprising how much of the federal government’s actions are based not in the law and the Constitution, but rather in policy. One man almost sixty years ago creates a policy with a stroke of a pen, and it effectively becomes law; another now removes it with a stroke of a different pen. If the latter is a problem, surely the former was too; if the former was not a problem, then why is the latter?

Speaking of the Constitution, what is the Constitutional basis for this large structure of federal funding for the sciences? Nothing in Article I, Section 8 appears to cover it: the encouragement of science appears to be limited to copyright and patent monopolies.

lesuorac

> Speaking of the Constitution, what is the Constitutional basis for this large structure of federal funding for the sciences? Nothing in Article I, Section 8 appears to cover it: the encouragement of science appears to be limited to copyright and patent monopolies.

This is like saying I read the first sentence of the wikipedia article and it doesn't mention something so it must not exist.

Congress authorized it in 1950; it's extremely visible. [1]

> The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is authorized and governed by the "National Science Foundation Act of 1950," as amended, as well as other statutes authorizing NSF activities and making appropriations to the agency.

[1]: https://new.nsf.gov/about/authorizing-legislation

eadmund

Yes, 42 U.S.C. 1861, et seq is the legal basis for the NSF. What’s the Constitutional basis for that law? The Congress only has the powers granted in Article I and further amendments. For example, the Congress does not have the power to regulate rents outside of federal territories. Which enumerated power enables 42 U.S.C 1861?

The Tenth Amendment clearly states, ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ If the Constitution does not grant a power to the Congress, it does not have it and it has no more legislative authority in that regard than you or I do.

sympil

Speaking of the Constitution, what is the Constitutional basis for this large structure of federal funding for the sciences? Nothing in Article I, Section 8 appears to cover it: the encouragement of science appears to be limited to copyright and patent monopolies.

The Constitution is a collection of statements and they collectively have implications. All of Euclidean geometry is based off of 5 statements. That the Constitution doesn’t explicitly say you can have a Department of the Air Force does not imply having one is unconstitutional.

Many Christians believe in the holy trinity despite that phrase appearing nowhere in the Bible.

figassis

This should make it clear. There is no such thing as being for or against ideology. If you exist, there are things you weakly believe in, and things you strongly believe in. The thing someone else strongly believes in, that we weakly believe in, we call ideology. So it's always been about fighting "their" ideology, not ideology.

Always be skeptical when someone defends only the things they strongly believe in. That goes both ways, for the left and right.

intermerda

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tome

> > Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

> > There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

But this is completely false. The credulousness with which it gets repeated is telling.

mrighele

> vetting projects that goes against the government's ideology...

This is with the previous administration was also doing. You were required to buy into the DEI ideology, prove your loyalty to the new religion.

bloopernova

I don't understand why you are calling it a religion.

What has been your personal experience with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in employment?

Mine has been that I watched a few videos that basically said: don't hit on people at work, don't mock people for disabilities, and don't treat people as lesser based on physical attributes.

In other words, don't be an asshole to people at work.

The only people I've seen given preferential treatment at work have been those who suck up to the leadership to get promoted.

joshvm

This is an interesting question.

I've seen it implemented in a couple of ways. One of the simplest is stronger blinding of applications so you aren't biased by irrelevant personal information.

For example this has been pretty effective in astronomy (proposals to get time on competitive instruments) where applications with female names were less likely to be approved. Simply removing the name was enough to improve the situation.

The fallacy is that people think DEI encourages preferential or token "diversity hires". When implemented correctly, it should mean that successful applications (for jobs, grants, whatever) go to the most qualified or deserving candidate using unbiased/impersonal metrics. That may mean encouraging minority groups to apply, but at the time of review, you should have no idea who the applicant is.

UltraSane

"I don't understand why you are calling it a religion."

Because it is using racism to try to cure racism and if you point out that this is wrong you will be called racist.

1over137

>I don't understand why you are calling it a religion.

There's a book on the topic: "Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America" by John McWhorter

xyzzy123

What you are describing is the motte. What happened to James Damore was the bailey.

Did he fail a critical vibe check / badly fail to read the room? Sure. Given the political climate I'm not surprised he was fired.

But is everyone already forgetting what things were like?

nxobject

Were you required to buy into it? Prove your “loyalty”? What do you mean?

xyzzy123

Applying for government contracts, academia, NGOs - but also a lot of "big company" procurement processes - required DEI statements etc.

jibal

It's an objective fact that DEI is neither an ideology nor a religion. And in the mouths of those on the right, "DEI" means anyone who isn't a cishet white male.

UltraSane

DEI is just as much an ideology as the current GOP rabid anti-DEI.

ahmeneeroe-v2

Nobody says they are against ideology. Everyone is pro-their own ideology and anti-everyone else's.

Additionally, I don't think there was an anti-China "smokescreen" used here. Anti-DEI was a central pillar of the Trump campaign, so this purge seems to be fully in line with what was stated explicitly for months in 2024.

plorg

The abortive OPM memo attempting to suspend all payments by the government claimed it was necessary to root out all DEI and "transgender ideology". If you substitute "communism" it is straight up the language of the Red Scare.

brookst

It’s the classic authoritarian doublespeak: they are 100% supportive of your rights, freedom, and obligation to believe what they tell you to believe.

ANewFormation

This seems great. It's increasingly apparent that the government was spending countless billions of dollars to push ideology in plainly weird ways. Why should somebody researching e.g. fusion for the Department of Energy also need to create a Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) plan, to even apply?

This should greatly reduce the overall bureaucratic nonsense in science and help get back to science simply being science without imposing ideological conformity tests.

andyjohnson0

> Why should somebody researching e.g. fusion for the Department of Energy also need to create a Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) plan, to even apply?

To try to ensure that the people working on the project are selected fairly and on merit, rather than unfairly and on personal prejudice.

ANewFormation

You can read about PIER plan requirements here. [1] Archive since the page is already dead. Things are moving ridiculously fast for government to the point I suspect there was alot of desire to get rid of all this stuff before, but people were unable to do so.

Anyhow it had nothing to do with the merit of the project or the team which were obviously already being evaluated. It was nothing but an unrelated ideological conformity test added as a requirement.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20230104150813/https://science.o...

intended

> Anyhow it had nothing to do with the merit of the project or the team which were obviously already being evaluated

Oh thats an interesting point to make. Were you part of these things? I really like unbiased merit based societies, so I was wondering what your experience was.

intended

If your goal is to break things, then yes, you can move fast.

citruspi

> Things are moving ridiculously fast for government to the point I suspect there was alot of desire to get rid of all this stuff before, but people were unable to do so.

Assuming "was alot of desire" is meant as "widespread support," not just "the President really desired it," that is an absolutely ridiculous interpretation. Fast does not mean strong consensus.

The government has also moved _ridiculously fast_ to

- pardon/commute the vast majority of J6 defendants including those convicted of violence towards law enforcement

- freeze federal aid across the board

- blame the recent aviation crash on DEI

- rename the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America

- revoke birthright citizenship

Does that mean that there "was alot of desire" to do those things? Absolutely not. It just means that those are things that the President has done unilaterally via executive orders or press release.

To be clear I'm not advocating for or against the govt.

But the idea that the government moving "ridiculously fast" is because there "was alot of desire" is a massive stretch. They are moving fast because they are steamrolling everyone in their path (allies included), and in their desire to "get shit done" they are implementing changes that are riddled with errors, and in some cases, even flat out illegal.

rafram

> Things are moving ridiculously fast for government to the point I suspect there was alot of desire to get rid of all this stuff before, but people were unable to do so.

No, Trump brought in a bunch of veterans of Elon’s takeover of Twitter to do the same thing to the federal government. The people at the top have been replaced, and the new agency leaders are focusing on implementing this anti-DEI agenda at the expense of pretty much everything else right now.

The sense I get from friends who work for the federal government is that this really feels like a hostile takeover. These are not changes that people welcome but have been too scared to ask for.

themgt

Great resource. imo Trump is jerking the wheel too hard in the other direction but some of this stuff was legitimately crazy. FAQ:

Q: I am only requesting support for one graduate student; do I still need to submit a PIER Plan?

A: Yes, all applications for funding to the Office of Science, with the exception of supplemental proposals, conference proposals, and proposals to the SBIR/STTR Programs (at this time), require a PIER Plan. All applicants are encouraged to consider what contributions they can make to creating more equitable and inclusive research environments. It is expected that the complexity and detail of a PIER Plan for a smaller research project and fewer project personnel would be less than that for a larger research project. [and no we won't provide you an example, it needs to be from your heart]

When you're requiring the greengrocer to submit a personalized statement justifying how each single apple he sells contributes to the project of worldwide socialism you might be risking provoking a reactionary counterrevolution. Americans need to just chill with trying to enforce micromanaged ideological conformity on a continent-sized country of 350 million people. And avoid winding up in a place "eroded by the ideological rituals that the entire power structure depend on, 'that are ever less credible, exactly because they are untested by public discussion and controversy'".

bookaway

Here's a take that I came across which I'd like your views on if possible:

When the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act were created, people asked the government to enforces these acts. Whatever you think of merits of DEI, the government decided to create DEI in order to enforce the Civil Rights Act and Americans with Disabilities act.

The problem is because they decided that DEI would be the mechanism to do this with, once DEI is rescinded the question is: If you're not going to enforce the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act through DEI, which mechanism do you plan to use to enforce them? According to this take, once DEI is rescinded there is no mechanism to enforce the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act anymore.

I'm pretty sure that most leftwing and rightwing people will agree that out of 3 millions government workers it's not entirely unlikely that there would be some some valid cases of discrimination against minorities and those with disabilities. The claim is that, whether DEI sucks or not, there is no avenue to contest racism and discrimination in government hiring anymore.

pipes

Considering a candidates suitability for a role based on their race, gender, or sexual orientation is the opposite merit based selection.

null

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intended

Huh? Really? Aren't people by default biased towards their ingroups and things familiar to them?

Don't we make movies of the times someone actually got noticed and was able to enrich our society through their merit?

Perhaps I am wrong.

nickburns

Is that not what Equal Protection under the 14A (applied to the USG through the Due Process clause of the 5A) is for?

tangent128

Without enforcement mechanisms (a PIER plan in this context), the 14th Amendment is just blots of ink on paper.

enkid

Having the government do anti -DEI purity tests for research is the exact opposite or reducing bureaucracy.

WesolyKubeczek

Funny how they replaced one performative mantra with another, which is just the same as the one they wanted to get rid of: you have to recite the $SYMBOL_OF_FAITH before you can have a job or apply for a grant.

bilbo0s

In fairness, that's what all political types do. It's all just quasi-religion all the way down. Anyone who thought any different was fooling themselves. It's unfortunate that it comes at the expense of scientific research, but hey, that's what people voted for.

Everyone in the US is getting exactly the government we deserve. That's the beauty of democracy! You get government that's precisely as good, or as bad, as you deserve. And you deserve government no better, or worse, than what you get.

Basically, we deserve it.

jmull

I wonder what could go wrong with constraining federal funding to political ideas the current president personally approves of?

"Great" isn't how anyone will describe it once the second-order consequences land. (There won't be many who like it once the first-order consequences land.)

ahmeneeroe-v2

Sure now apply this thinking to the transition from the pre-DEI times to the status quo which Trump et al are dismantling

jmull

You may agree with the incoming anti-DEI policies, but don't let that obscure what's happening here.

Previously, federal funding was controlled by congress, and subject to its collective politics, via long-playing out machinations/compromises/horse-trading, etc, and then to the collective politics of the various enforcement bodies.

It now appears that federal funding is generally subject to the personal politics of the current president. That may seem nice for the specific policies you agree with. But... there are likely to be many policies you don't agree with. Especially since there will be a new president after not too long.

Also, since political purity tests have to be subjectively enforced, they are inevitably subverted to corruption. You can pass the test with the right amount of money delivered to the right people in the right way. That's nice for the people receiving the money, but the corruption quickly becomes horrifically inefficient and costly.

The question isn't whether the previous system was perfect -- it wasn't. The question is whether the new system is worse, and how much worse.

I'm pretty surprised how unaware people seem to be about the power/money grab that is happening. People never seem to learn that you have to look at what people do, not what they say.

brookst

This is an ideological conformity test.

cdot2

Yes, being opposed to discrimination is an ideological conformity test.

brookst

Other way around — prohibiting steps to reduce discrimination is the test.

They’ve literally banned efforts to ensure research is free of discrimination. We’re in opposite world, or at least pretending to be.

bumby

You do realize that the EO this replaced has almost the exact verbiage about discrimination, right? We should be focusing on what is different between the two instead of being sidetracked by that argument.

fzeroracer

Nothing says reducing overall bureaucratic nonsense by adding more bureaucratic nonsense AND demanding people make a loyalty pledge.

csomar

Because DEI audience leaned Democrats and everyone here is trying the hide the sun with a transparent glass. This is backfiring in a big way and the only hope is that it sets strict rules to who gets the money (ie: rather than going the other way, where the incumbent disburse the money to his audience).

enkid

I don't understand what you're saying. Who's hiding the sun through transparent glass?

flanked-evergl

This is not backfiring at all, great success, people are really happy about this. Trump's approval rating is higher than ever.

cgh

His approval rating is historically low: https://news.gallup.com/poll/655955/trump-inaugural-approval...

I wonder how his approval will compare with his first term. His final approval rating is the lowest of any president ever: https://news.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approval-ra...

eli_gottlieb

> the government was spending countless billions of dollars to push ideology

We can count the billions that the government spends on science, period, through the NSF, DOE, DARPA, and NIH. Thus, the fraction spent on pushing ideology is certainly not "countless billions".

taurknaut

> It's increasingly apparent that the government was spending countless billions of dollars to push ideology in plainly weird ways.

Did you miss the last 80 years of anti-communist, pro-capitalist, free-market propaganda? The american government has been the most powerful ideological force in the world for basically all of living memory.

rbanffy

[flagged]

ANewFormation

You're definitely right and I also do not agree with that stuff either, but it was mostly done "appropriately" in that it was through avenues, like the State Department or CIA, who have propaganda as part of their mission.

In this case you had things like the Department of Energy requiring Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research plans to even apply for funding.

The two big differences I see is that that is a wholly inappropriate avenue for ideological enforcement, and that it's also exceptionally divisive.

Things are changing in modern times but historically free markets, capitalism, and so on were very widely shared values. The contemporary equality of outcome (versus opportunity) stuff is extremely new and extremely divisive. The government pushing it, and frequently in very inappropriate ways (the military also comes to mind) is just very weird.

idle_zealot

> requiring Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research plans

> equality of outcome (versus opportunity) stuff is extremely new and extremely divisive

Equality of outcome, in the sense that we should hire unqualified people for research positions, is thankfully an incredibly rare and frankly insane position that almost nobody holds. Also thankfully, that's not what these required plans were. The requirement was that groups applying for grants have a specific and actionable plan for making sure that equality of opportunity was ensured. In fact, advantaging one group over another, such as with quotas, would directly violate DEI policy[1]. Typically, a plan would reference existing enrollment/acceptance policies of the company/university/department making an application, which are designed to make sure employees/students are not advantaged or disadvantaged by immutable or protected characteristics. Common examples would be:

- Make sure that your hiring panel is diverse to avoid bias towards whatever groups are over-represented at your company already. It's a well-studied phenomena that people are inclined to like others who are similar to themselves. Without any other factors in play (skill is randomly distributed in applicants, all of your employees are free of sexual/racial bias), if your company consists of, say, 80% men and 20% women, and you pick your interviewers totally at random, you will continue to hire more men than women. If you use a 50/50 split on your interview panel then your hiring becomes more meritocratic by virtue of factoring out self-similarity biases.

- Implement structured interviews and standardized qualifications-based hiring, rather than relying on interviewer preference.

- Learning about potential subconscious biases helps people account for them. Incorporating bias training can mitigate (though not eliminate) hiring biases. Of course, as you have no doubt experienced, these training courses tend to be pretty boring and patronizing, but that's true of most employee training, so /shrug.

- Diversifying applicant sourcing. If you only look for applicants via one platform, adding some more that tend to be used by different groups to your sourcing strategy.

You have bought into the oft-repeated lie that DEI is some Harrison Bergeron-esque attempt to cripple institutions. You were probably pointed to one or two extremely poor implementations of such policies that were genuinely unfair. The broader movement, and most implementations of it, are about equality of opportunity. The intentional destruction of public perception of these policies and subsequent removal only guarantees that existing self-perpetuating gaps in opportunity will persist.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241222222206/https://science.o...

Archive link, because of course the new admin took down the page.

esalman

It's really contradictory that the party of less regulation are introducing more friction and bureaucracy in scientific research process. But then it's also the party of anti-science so I can see why.

beeforpork

It is counter-contradictor measures. It is against nay-sayer people who research and find out stuff. Being smart will cost you, because it's not the goal. Less research, and lower levels of education equals more people to fall for simplistic solutions and promisses. The definition of truth is being redefined, and open-minded research and education is in the way of that.

And it is always the same pattern.

tmountain

It's only less regulation when it involves allowing big companies to do whatever they want. Rules for thee but not for me.

rsynnott

Less regulation for _companies_, more regulation for _people_.

baggachipz

I was told that corporations are people, my friend.

ludwik

They are considered people only when it comes to rights, but not when it comes to restrictions and consequences.

easytiger

It really shouldn't be easy for ideologues to spend other peoples money. There are entire parallel structures in government, academia and now in business not contributing one iota of effort towards whatever the directed goal of their organisations are principally for.

https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/dcl-social-behavio...

ahmeneeroe-v2

this is pretzel logic.

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paulryanrogers

They are also the anti-government party, so sabotage is another motivating factor.

mike_hearn

It's not a contradiction: wanting a small state implies both wanting a low burden of regulation on the private sector specifically, and also wanting a great deal of care to be taken with how money is spent by the government. It isn't a general argument for allowing arbitrary levels of public sector fraud or waste, and it feels bad faith to conflate these two things as if one implies the other. Nobody in the history of politics has argued on principle for a state that has high taxes yet doesn't enforce any rules on how the money is spent.

In this case, the administration believes a lot of the work the NSF funds isn't actually scientific. In that they are correct. The replication crisis has been rolling for 15 years now with no real improvements, largely because the people who distribute the money don't care if it gets used for things that are genuinely scientific or if it gets used for things that merely have the surface level appearance of being scientific. The NSF funds vast amounts of pseudo-science that can be trivially identified and people have been talking about these problems for years with no resolution. Apparently, they need some friction and bureaucracy as otherwise they won't do their jobs correctly. In a free market government intervention isn't required to solve this problem because free actors will just stop funding pseudo-scientific work after a while, but the NSF isn't running a free market, and so the problem just never gets solved.

This article focuses on social science but talks a bit about the general problems at the NSF at the end, and although it was written in 2020 thus at the start of the Biden administration the proposals the author makes for fixes are basically what's happening right now:

https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...

Nobody actually benefits from the present state of affairs, but you can't ask isolated individuals to sacrifice their careers for the "greater good": the only viable solutions are top-down, which means either the granting agencies or Congress (or, as Scott Alexander has suggested, a Science Czar). You need a power that sits above the system and has its own incentives in order: this approach has already had success with requirements for pre-registration and publication of clinical trials. Right now I believe the most valuable activity in metascience is not replication or open science initiatives but political lobbying

...

An NSF/NIH inquisition that makes sure the published studies match the pre-registration (there's so much """"""""""QRP"""""""""" in this area you wouldn't believe). The SEC has the power to ban people from the financial industry—let's extend that model to academia.21

...

It is difficult to convey just how low the standards are. The marginal researcher is a hack and the marginal paper should not exist. There's a general lack of seriousness hanging over everything—if an undergrad cites a retracted paper in an essay, whatever; but if this is your life's work, surely you ought to treat the matter with some care and respect.

Why is the Replication Markets project funded by the Department of Defense? If you look at the NSF's 2019 Performance Highlights, you'll find items such as "Foster a culture of inclusion through change management efforts" (Status: "Achieved") and "Inform applicants whether their proposals have been declined or recommended for funding in a timely manner" (Status: "Not Achieved"). Pusillanimous reports repeat tired clichés about "training", "transparency", and a "culture of openness" while downplaying the scale of the problem and ignoring the incentives. No serious actions have followed from their recommendations.

It's not that they're trying and failing—they appear to be completely oblivious. We're talking about an organization with an 8 billion dollar budget that is responsible for a huge part of social science funding, and they can't manage to inform people that their grant was declined! These are the people we must depend on to fix everything.

esalman

Riddle me this, what has the Republican party done to alleviate replication crisis in scientific research?

mike_hearn

How about this move that we're discussing? Getting rid of openly ideological research grants will help the replication rate quite a bit, as that stuff is riddled with basic replication problems, much worse than the median paper. It's just too easy to take some grant money then publish something pseudo-scientific which sounds good to left wing ears, knowing that nobody will double check because they want it to be true.

As an example, a lot of research into "misinformation" is like that. It's not replicable out of the gate because the papers don't describe their procedure for deciding whether a claim is true or false. They just present random lists of things that conservatives tend to believe, assert that none of them are true / they're conspiracy theories, then do a survey and use the results to conclude that conservatives are dumb / Russian bots. That's it, that's the entire field. There's no methodology, no theories, nothing to be refined or refuted. There are thousands of papers like this, it's astonishing to witness.

I've been writing for years on the topic of bad science, and the fact that universities/granting bodies claim to care about science whilst simultaneously funding and celebrating this stuff is why their reputation has gone down the drain. The consequences were absolutely predictable. Nobody can claim they didn't see it coming.

Right now, there's just a grant freeze combined with a review to find the really nakedly partisan DEI stuff. That's nothing. Much more intense stuff is well within the Overton Window of possibilities by this point, like ramped up prosecutions or large scale defunding.

fn-mote

From the article:

>> For academic scientists, the list of banned activities could include efforts to increase diversity in the scientific workforce, collaborations with foreign scientists, and research on more environmentally friendly technologies.

These are not the "vast amounts of pseudo-science" that your comment refers to.

I have nothing against the ideas suggested in the 2020 blog post that you cite... it's just that is not what is happening because of the executive order.

The executive orders do not address bad science.

So overall, I agree with most ideas in your comment but I do not think it is relevant to the current situation. The administration is not trying to fix bad science.

esalman

+1. I'd even say they are promoting bad science by putting up people like RFJ Jr for cabinet positions.

sevensor

The evil genius of this move is that it gets everybody arguing about DEI, and we’re letting the continued expansion of absolute executive power centered in the president go unchecked. It’s not even about party; this started with FDR or even earlier, massively expanded under LBJ and again under W and Obama, and now here we are. The president feels no obligation at all to execute what the Congress authorized him to. Instead the limits of power are whatever the president can get away with. We have a constitutional problem where the Congress is unwilling or unable to legislate effectively and the executive gets to make policy unilaterally. This is not the balance of powers from the U.S. constitution. This is something else.

pjc50

> We have a constitutional problem where the Congress is unwilling or unable to legislate effectively and the executive gets to make policy unilaterally. This is not the balance of powers from the U.S. constitution

The Republican party controls both houses and the presidency, having already stacked the supreme court, so they get to do whatever they want and there is no balance of powers.

Inevitable consequence of a two-party system with first past the post voting.

FredPret

There is still a very clear balance of power.

All Republicans and all Democrats don’t act and think as one. Take any collection of humans, of any size, and their opinions will be spread across a spectrum.

There are, and always will be, some members in either house and of any party that find it’s in their political interest to debate and pull new laws left or right.

This is especially true under FPTP because each member has to answer to an area, and different areas of a country have baked-in differences in their ideal political outcomes and points of view.

sevensor

Balance of powers has nothing to do with party; it’s about the ability of one branch of government to operate without constraint by the other branches of government. It was instituted in the US by people who were trying to take lessons from history; both recent (the Intolerable Acts) and ancient (Appius Claudius, Octavian, Alexander, the Thirty), and it’s been forgotten by generations who’ve come to take its protections for granted.

dboreham

If that were true then we wouldn't be watching a collection of circus performers get confirmed by congress.

tastyfreeze

Looking at the past voting records, Democrats often vote as a block in both houses of Congress. The same can't be said about Republicans.

thrance

Trump has definitely purged the Republican party of its most moderate members, leaving him surrounded by only the most radical of sycophants. Why do you put so much trust into your institutions? Trump has promised that "we won't ever have to vote ever again", he has been made untouchable by the supreme court, and is now passing budgetary laws without congress.

The opposition is powerless, his own party has become an echo chamber for fascist talking points.

noobermin

This is a naive, context-free misunderstanding of the present moment based on supposedly intuitive truisms. The Republican party is Trump's party and has been for years now. Pretending there is that much variation that matters is ridiculous and can be remedied by reading any piece of news from the last few years.

coliveira

The US is now a formal democracy, but it doesn't work as one. There is one guy making decisions, the remaining are either too feeble to do anything about or just fine with the status quo. Yes, there are formal avenues for responses, like the judiciary system, but they've been made toothless. The very fact that Trump is back in the WH is proof of this.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos

FPTP is a superior option to proportional representation. Belgium still lacks a federal government despite voting 5 months before the Americans and being just some 10 million people and we aren't going to get one either before they get their whole cabinet (minister equivalents) confirmed and installed. This is because there are 5 parties trying form a coalition raging from nationalist-separatist to socialist-rebranded-to-progressive across 2 languages. Brussels lacks its regional government too and is even further away from resolving the impasse.

America would be well advised to avoid this. They'd immediately get a language divide between English and Spanish. The alleged "grand coalitions" of the Democrat and Republican parties would crumble. There might be some consensus in the center which might be large enough but then policies would never change regardless of who you vote for, just like in the times before Trump.

tbrownaw

> The Republican party controls both houses and the presidency, having already stacked the supreme court, so they get to do whatever they want and there is no balance of powers.

- No, the supreme court is the same size it's always been.

- No, members of congress don't always vote the party line (although this has consistently gotten worse over time)

- No, that's not what "balance of powers" means.

bumby

>The Supreme Court is the same size is always been

“The number of Justices on the Supreme Court changed six times before settling at the present total of nine in 1869”

https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/institution.aspx

hiddencost

Point of order, the supreme court has changed size 6 times

https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/institution.aspx#:~:text=...

dboreham

> - No, the supreme court is the same size it's always been.

Stacked in the sense that more members were appointed by one party vs the other (including one by dubious means), and those people apparently are quite partisan.

intended

Stacking here is about the make up of the benchm not size. I don't understand this link, its seems like an obvious point.

Partisanship works in the current political environment. Cutting off your own projects in case the other party follows your lead, has paid off more than bipartisanship. Voting across aisles is strictly controlled.

Trump was voted in precisely because The R base was tired of people talking about identity issues, getting to power, and then doing nothing about it.

Trump is giving people exactly what they were told would solve their problems, for decades.

The balance of powers has been broken, for good reason. It ensures political goals - see Bi-partisanship doesn't pay.

chomp

1.) non sequitur

2.) missing the point

3.) pedantic

The point is that the current party in power has had multiple opportunities to reign in the current lawlessness and the current minority party has attempted to do so, to no result.

snowwrestler

I think it’s a little early to call the end of the U.S. Constitution. There is a time component to the rule of law that can be frustrating in the moment but has always been true.

The President is free to assert his desires. Other parts of the country are free to push back if they choose. This takes filing lawsuits, lobbying Congress, pursuing prosecutions, etc. all of which take time, money, and effort. Which in turn allows short-term disruption to happen as the legal process plays out. Which again, is frustrating.

Political mood is also more fickle than people usually believe at the beginning of a new administration. FDR, LBJ, W, Obama, and many other presidents passed through a time in which conventional wisdom held that they had changed the game and amassed too much power. In every case we can look back and see that while they each have left a legacy that endures, it’s smaller than expected at the time. The pendulum swung the other way later on.

My own opinion on this is that “don’t tell me what to do” is among the most popular political positions among Americans. So for example, to the extent DEI felt like being told what to do, it became unpopular. But now that anti-DEI is in power, I expect the bloom will come off pretty quickly. In part because of overreach by a new administration overestimating their mandate. (As most new administrations do.)

sevensor

Agreed, I wouldn’t call it the end either. But it’s a problem for our system of government and I think it’s worth calling attention to.

mywittyname

> I think it’s a little early to call the end

I don't. This has been a long, gradual erosion of constitutional rights, and now the system has crumbled. It may appear to stand, but it's merely resting on the rubble.

SCOTUS is going to rule with GOP doctrine, regardless of what the constitution says. The GOP may pursue legal avenues for their actions in an attempt to not make it so apparent that the country is now under single party, totalitarian rule. But they don't have to (see: news).

It started with minor constitutional violations, like emoluments, and has ended with blatant ones, such as attacking birthright citizenship.

ahmeneeroe-v2

Interesting and high-quality comment.

>I think it’s a little early to call the end of the U.S. Constitution.

I totally disagree with this though. It is several generations late to start crying about the end of the US Constitution.

I basically agree with the rest of your comment though, especially the "don't tell me what to do" and the Presidential "honeymoon period".

bumby

I used to think the problem of governance by EO was getting worse too but the stats tell a different story:

https://www.statista.com/chart/7658/number-of-executive-orde...

idle_zealot

Somehow "number of EOs" doesn't sound like the right metric to use when determining whether executive power is growing. Surely it's the content that matters.

ANewFormation

FDR forced people to give up all their gold assets at a fixed rate, under threat of imprisonment for a decade. He then proceeded to nearly double the declared exhange rate up once the government had confiscated everybody's gold.

All done by executive order. Makes basically all modern EOs look pretty innocuous by comparison.

That said I actually agree and would love to see a sharp reduction in executive power, especially as it comes to using the military. If we're going to go bombing places, that should require a declaration of war from Congress. And 'emergency' powers should not be enabled for decades on end.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

bombcar

Especially when there are EOs for naming post offices and other boring mechanical work of the executive.

It would take some serious effort (and there’d be disagreement) but maybe you could classify “important” government changes and if they were enacted by congress, EO, courts, etc.

bumby

I’m open to that, but what context do you think is appropriate and how would you measure it for an unbiased metric?

bkfunk

The number of EOs is a poor measure of the extent of executive power. There are many other ways to concentrate executive power; for example OMB (part of the Executive Office of the President) issues “M-memos” (“M” for “management”) to the heads of all departments, instructing them on how to implement EOs, laws, and White House priorities.

There is a consensus among researchers of the workings of the US government and the legal context thereof that, since FDR and especially since Reagan, that the “imperial presidency” has been gaining ground.

pwagland

Related to that, the first 100 days are typically when there is the highest number of orders per day. https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/politics/biden-exec...

Tump did 20% of his total, from the first term, in the first 100 days. Biden did just under 1/3 of his total in the first 100 days.

greentxt

I wouldn't call him genius, but maybe you're right.

rbanffy

Whoever got the idea of flooding the space with outrageous EOs is a genius. Certainly evil as well.

insane_dreamer

Pretty sure it’s the work of Stephen Miller - who is now his senior policy advisor.

8 years ago the Trump admin had no idea what to do. Now they’re prepared and much more dangerous.

Some things will be reversed in 4 years time and we can ride out the storm. but others - like renewed emphasis on fossil fuels to reward the big donors and have energy for AI - will have lasting effects on my children and their children — those make me truly furious.

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ahmeneeroe-v2

I agree with you that FDR was a turning point. Before that Lincoln was a major Executive expansion.

We have been beyond US Constitutional limitations for many lifetimes.

noobermin

People ought to stop thinking everyone one else is playing 3D chess and just accept what is happening in front of their eyes.

fzeroracer

Conservatives realized that they could effectively lock down Congress, take over the Supreme Court and then vest all power in the executive. The whole arguments against DEI, smaller governments etc are all a smoke screen because they have zero issues with nepotism and favoritism as long as it benefits them. And no issue with government overreach as long as they control it.

Unfortunately I think the only direction is balkanization of the states. And I don't think that is going to end well.

sevensor

It may be easy to get mad as the Republicans for this, but there’s a clear bipartisan precedent here. Remember DACA? Might have been a good policy if Congress had enacted it. Bad precedent as an executive action though, because it establishes that the president’s ability to make immigration policy is effectively unlimited. Today’s ICE raids are made possible by DACA.

vharuck

I wouldn't count the Executive Orders related to ICE in the "nepotism and favoritism" group fzeroracer referred to. Those might be more of the "smokescreen." The orders for mass layoffs or encouraging quitting of civil service seen more like the ulterior motive. Allowing the president to remove "disloyal" civil servants would take us back to the spoils system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system

Then, either they use existing executive power to ensure Republicans have an insurmountable advantage in national elections, or they haven't thought things through and we'll see even larger shifts in federal regulations after each administration change.

fzeroracer

I'm not particularly going to disagree that the Dems are useless or not part of the problem, because they absolutely are. A lot of the issues we have is because of continued attempts at bipartisanship watering down bills into oblivion, means-testing and obsession with locking out people further left.

But ultimately a lot of our core foundational agencies have been functioning well regardless. And it's only the right that's intent on tearing them down no matter the consequences. So while the Dems enable this, the Republicans enact it.

toast0

DACA certainly pushed the limits of executive authority, but...

Immigration raids are pretty clearly an executive function, and they happened prior to DACA and prior to ICE. Executive prioritization of federal law enforcement is normal and expected.

panic

No, ICE was established in 2003, post-9/11, way before DACA in 2012, and it was always intended to be used for this purpose.

coliveira

I'm all for balkanization. It is better than the status quo.

insane_dreamer

We have pretty fixed red/blue blocks of states and Trump/MAGA has made the gap much wider.

In earlier years I would have been okay living in a red state - not my pref but no big deal. Now I’m no more willing to raise my kids in a deep red state than I am in Russia or China.

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yibg

Yea, looks like the US is going full on Russian mode here. I'm not all that disappointed in Trump himself, this was no surprise. I'm disappointed at the lack of meaningful opposition. Most of the republican part have fallen in line and the Dems aren't doing much.

Question here for this group. In this day of technology, information is power seems much more relevant. I don't have clear data, but it seems from observation and analysis by others social media played a pretty key role: "fake news", info bubbles, biasing your feeds etc. What are some ideas on reliable ways to provide access to accurate information?

loudmax

I agree with your broader point, but I really wish people wouldn't refer to MAGA Republicans as "conservative." Right-wing, or reactionary, certainly. But there's nothing "conservative" about undermining the rule of law and ignoring the Constitution.

By the same logic, I don't like calling far-left cancel culture "liberal." I'm afraid our partisanship has blinded us to genuine liberal and conservative virtues.

WillowWithAWand

I also wouldn't label cancel culture as "far-left" because just as it isn't in any way "liberal", it isn't limited to those on the proverbial left of the spectrum. The mainstream language used to discuss politics simply lacks the ability to reflect the nuance needed in the 21st century. And that's not even getting into the discussion on what we call "cancel culture" because there is a big gulf between "that person said a thing that was a bit off" and "that person is a literal criminal/fascist" in my opinion.

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Gabriel54

I'm genuinely puzzled by people's reaction to DEI measures. In my experience, they have in many cases been explicitly exclusionary (e.g. a conference only for certain minorities, specific support preferences). I have never heard anyone criticize "outreach" in general. The problem starts when outreach means only targeting specific minorities.

bix6

It is wild to pull already granted money. I meet so many scientists who just need $X to continue pursuing their research and it’s generally not a large sum. So this is incredibly disappointing for the research ecosystem which feeds the startup ecosystem. This hurts our competitiveness on the global stage and decreases our future quality of life.

rsanek

another great reminder that if the money isn't in an account in your name that you fully control, you shouldn't count on it. have had to learn this the hard way myself.

rsfern

Lots of politically charged comments on this discussion. If you disagree with NSF’s merit and broader impact review criteria, that’s fine and it’s important to have a healthy conversation about it, but I think it’s important to take a step back and thoughtfully address concrete ideas that are actually contained in the proposal review criteria.

These are the kinds of issues at stake in terms of the broader impacts criteria:

- Is it good that NSF promotes applications that include historically minority-serving institutions (as opposed to just the same few R1 universities)?

- should NSF prioritize proposals with strong scientific outreach activities aimed at boosting engagement and opportunities in under-represented demographics?

Keep in mind that NSF funding is extremely competitive. It’s not like subpar research is ubiquitously getting funded over better research with lower “broader impacts” scores. Successful proposals excel on both fronts.

Gabriel54

1. There are thousands of universities in the US that are neither R1/R2 nor "historically minority serving". What about those universities?

2. Where did you get the idea that outreach is not still an important priority? The issue is what is euphemistically called "under-represented demographics" which we understand excludes many Americans on the basis of their race.

legolas2412

> It’s not like subpar research is ubiquitously getting funded over better research with lower “broader impacts” scores.

Yeah I don't buy that.

I've seen equity directives in universities explicitly asking to hire only underrepresented minorities, or give one third of a candidate's score based on race and gender characteristics (the other two thirds were resume and interview).

I've heard equity hiring quotas given to execs in tech industry. I've heard of pressure to hire/promote minorities.

I've seen what affirmative action did to University admissions. The admissions office reduced Asian Americans score on "likeability". As a result they needed a higher sat score than any other group for admissions. The hiring office essentially said that they did not like Asians.

So sorry, I do not buy the argument that equity initiatives just choose a minority representation from equally qualified samples. Because from what you say, Asian americans wouldn't have been discriminated against.

omgJustTest

They need arbitrary criteria on which to assess that money goes to the “right” group of people. Competitive awards already had a lot of arbitrary factors, this is yet another person to add to this, with a uniquely political perspective. Also if they don’t have to award the money it is likely they don’t.

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