Words flagged in search of current NSF awards

Does that fall under global warming denial?

You're not wrong about the words not being banned, but that's not what the person you're responding to claimed.

I'll also note that being flagged for further scrutiny can effectively end a project that requires disbursement of funds in a timely manner. Ask me how I know, and I'll tell you that I was looking for work last week, because the projects I work on would not have been able to pay me next month if the executive order had not been rescinded. This isn't my speculation, it's what we were told by leadership. These projects are not at all DEI-related, but a shotgun approach to halting disbursal until we're convinced otherwise would have caused a lot of projects to go tits up in the interim. Grant-funded science projects generally do not have huge cash reserves to pay employees until the money spigot turns on again. So, applying a filter blacklist can be very destructive, just by creating temporary false positives.

The words searched are so common that it could literally flag a sizeable portion of all of science and such flags are liable if the trend continues to be handled by political hacks with zero expertise and expansive targets for cuts.

Heavy collateral damage is incredibly likely.

Also research with the wrong ideological underpinning can't violate anti-discrimination laws even if one imagines erroneously that application of same in hiring would despite prior supreme court findings.

Lastly over zealous punative punishment of lawful speech leading to aggressive self censorship is a entirely legitimate concern.

The logical result is suppressing the sciences. It is in fact the very same political correctness oft decried by nazis and bigots weaponized against everyone who isn't a christian white male.

> Reading comprehension is shocking, not just in you but most people here. The post just said "can cause a grant to be pulled". That's entirely consistent with this list being a screening filter and somebody will look at what the grant/application is actually for.

Both the post and the comment you are replying to used the term "flagged". Best I can tell, they aren't claiming what you seem to think they are claiming.

Their reading comprehension is just fine. The whole point of directives like this is the arbitrary nature by which they can be enforced. When everything can be flagged for review by a political commissar...

In the last century, neither fascists or stalinists had any issue with banning 'Jewish' science, despite it having absolutely nothing to do with race. Because their goal was getting rid of enemies of administration.

[dead]

Please don't cross into personal attack or name-calling, no matter how wrong another comment is or you feel it is.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Where is the government going to find all these censors with working minds? No American would consent to doing that unless their zeal had blinded them from something much more important than the compliance of a physics paper.

A lot of people like to focus very exclusive on the aspect if its top-down, with the implied message being that censorship is acceptable as long its done by companies or community leaders rather than government. Yes, it is worse when it is done by governments. But no, it doesn't make censorship acceptable. So much debate happens because some people view all censorship as bad, that is rules intended to inhibit speech and shutdown wrong-thinking, while others want to distinguish between government censorship and "good" censorship. As someone who stand in the "all censorship as bad" category, there is no good censorship! Only grades of wrong.

Different wrongness do get compare. That doesn't make very very very wrong to be equivalent to just very wrong. Both are however wrong. The kind of censorship and self-censorship we have seen in science, popular media and even humor in the last few decades has been insane compared to the decades previous. To throw in a random example, someone who criticized religion was murdered a few days ago in Sweden, and as a society we kind just expected it and waiting for it to happen. Something like Monty Python could not exist today as they would had either been censored or murdered, and so they would have been forced to self-censor long before their skills as comedians would have grown.

Censorship is not something we can pick and choose from.

The same issue as with some other terms in 21st century. For example monopoly by the 19th century definition would be almost impossible today, because "look, that company has a whopping 0.1% of the market, hence we with 99.9% are not a monopoly". So yeah, it wasn't banned everywhere, but that reached momentum wide enough for me to consider it essentially a ban.

And as a I said below, even if call it not a ban but idk "popular advisory", the point is that it set a precedent. And now right wingers would really ban words they don't like.

Also they may argue that they did not ban their words either. Can you apply for grant elsewhere? Yes you can, technically. "So what the problem"(c) they will ask.

If there was any value at all in renaming it to main, it was preventing people from being reminded of the unhappy concept of slavery. I don't think one ban is more conceptual than the other, if there's a difference it's that scrubbing an unhappy concept from research is more pragmatically damaging than scrubbing it from nomenclature - not because one's morally better, but because the former is more difficult to evade.

Yes. That ban (sorry, I still think that's what it was in reality) was a mild one and inconsequential. I personally have no problem with that specific episode.

The real problem is that and other such minor episodes normalized word bans as a general principle. So as soon as more radical people come in power, they have used it to ban what THEY want.

Just like normalizing talks about occupation of Greenland today, will inevitably lead to the real occupation in 20-30 years in the future, by some Mango v2.0.

Are they actually banning it? Or do they just say "we are not paying for that kind of research that we see brings no value to our society"?

In my opinion government focus should be on the education of young people, and not on trying to force and bend adults to behave in the narrow "correct" way. Again, with some exceptions. If we want more female representation in STEM - focus on education. If we want people not to use some slur or derogatory term - teach people in the school. And so on. The problem is that across the world education is a third tier activity for the government and is largely neglected. No big profits there.

Master. Slave. Look at me go!

Yes, we have mandatory linter rules which won’t let us check in code that contains the word “whitelist” or “blacklist” or “master” because they are somehow racist.

I work at the biggest tech company, which employs hundreds of thousands of people and these rules are applied across all codebases.

This stuff is widespread across big companies and the government.

FIRE has been around for decades and has dutifully resisted acquiring a partisan valence

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

good. /s

Are you trying to justify or explain?