At the moment it's simply weird discriminatory cutting of grants by internet trolls, but it's quite likely that all Federal research funding will vanish at the next budget. Leaving that to China to catch up.
The firehose of money won't go away, but you can bet dollars to donuts that it will be redirected right towards a spoils system, where the administration's friends and supporters will be reaping the rewards of victory.
Sadly unsurprising, given the witch-hunt nature of recent cuts – Emily Riehl's been a big source of mentorship and inspiration for women in mathematics, and she's been pretty vocal about it. The point is to make a show of stamping out "DEI" for a headline, and to hope that no one looks too closely at the details.
I think it is true that a subset of HN readers don't want to see stories about politics. This subset may intersect with another subset that is happy to see the things described in these stories happen.
> I think it is true that a subset of HN readers don't want to see stories about politics.
There is a huge subset of HN readers who don't live in the USA, and thus don't really care about political drama in the USA as long as it is not relevant for their own life.
What I'm going to call the "anti woke mind virus" has captured a lot of people: they're happy to burn down anything because they're annoyed about "woke", often based on a single misrepresented incident.
What would you have us do? People voted for this. I’ve hated every minute of this, but they obviously have the authority here. Apart from legal challenges, this very much seems like a “we voted to make our country nontrivially worse off in the long run” scenario.
Trump's approval numbers do not suggest indifference, but more likely self censorship. I think most people were overwhelmingly opposed to all of this DEI stuff, but that can be disingenuously framed as saying somebody is opposed to e.g. diversity or inclusion, as opposed to them being opposed to what DEI amounts to - which is about pursuing equality of outcome, something that is in direct conflict with everything that the Social Rights Movement fought for and achieved.
I think there's also the argument that the government should not be pushing social ideology, period. Certainly not the federal government. In particular if they were just replacing the DEI funding with e.g. Jesus funding, I would be vehemently opposed to this all. But so long as they continue to just cut the funding without replacement, I'm instead vehemently supportive of it.
Self-censorship about their opinions on cutting grants that mention forbidden keywords, even if the grant outcomes have nothing to do with said keywords?
There’s an unbelievable opportunity for other countries to pick up world class U.S researchers.
The next four years all countries need to do is offer the research funding and citizenship and university positions and entirely new industries and centers of knowledge could be created.
I can only dream of the EU snatching top talent from the US and kick starting a competetive European tech sector. Cloud computing, AI etc. Now would be a great time to take the initiative.
> I can only dream of the EU snatching top talent from the US
This top talent will not be satisfied with the common salaries in many EU countries. Also, it will be unsatisfied that Ireland and Malta are the only EU countries where English is an official language, and in none of them English is the only official language.
That would be truly exceptional, but: the US already is the only country that makes its citizens pay taxes when they're not resident at all. (Lots will make you pay taxes if you're partially resident)
They could quite easily take out anti-dual-taxation agreements and try to make US overseas nationals pay two sets of tax.
The existing regulations giving the US global jurisdiction over KYC/AML for Americans can also make it hard for Americans to get bank accounts overseas; that could easily be escalated.
It's not based on titles. Here [1] is the proposal. It included "Furthermore, by employing and mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM, this project will aim at bridging the gap in institutions across the US. It will train the next generation of scholars from minority serving universities and marginalized communities in the fields of cybersecurity, utilization of renewable resources, and machine learning to address the pressing problems of this age."
Previously DEI adherence weighed into which proposals were awarded funding. They no longer do. It's unclear exactly how this is working but suspect they're flagging grants where either the entire point was DEI, or where the project was unrelated to DEI but the DEI stuff pushed it into the acceptable range (and/or drove the grant amount higher than necessary for the underlying science), and cancelling them.
Interesting, thank you for the addendum! Do you believe it is likely that inclusions of things such as "by employing and mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM, this project will aim at bridging the gap in institutions across the US" result in a higher likeliness of funding? I also wonder if Hacker News would generally consider it to be ethical to use this to increase the likeliness of funding. In this case it does seem unrelated to DEI otherwise.
The way it’s being done is profoundly unserious, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is politicians interfering with what it’s acceptable to think and study.
> NSF actually required investigators to highlight outreach to diverse audiences in their grant applications. ( #catch22 )
So it used to be that you had stretch to include whatever little bits of DEI-connection you had in your grant applications (what's the DEI-equivalent of greenwashing?), and now the tables have turned and they're being punished for it. So much waste.
> So it used to be that you had stretch to include whatever little bits of DEI-connection you had in your grant applications (what's the DEI-equivalent of greenwashing?), and now the tables have turned and they're being punished for it.
Lesson learned: as a founding agency, you should never create incentives to introduce politics into research proposals. Instead, you should incentivize to keep politics out of them as much as possible. Otherwise, as you can see here, drama starts to kindle as soon as the prevailing political "wind direction" changes.
Why has this post been flagged? Category theory is extremely relevant to programming and this post has plenty of points and comments. Any thoughts dang?
> IN PARALLEL, THE PI HAS CONCRETE PLANS TO CONTINUE HER EXPOSITORY AND OUTREACH WORK WHICH INCLUDE A NEW BOOK (ELEMENTS OF INFINITY-CATEGORY THEORY, JOINT WITH VERITY), LECTURES DIRECTED AT THE GENERAL PUBLIC, SURVEY ARTICLES PREPARED FOR A VARIETY OF AUDIENCES, AND EFFORTS TO IMPROVE ACCESS TO ADVANCED MATHEMATICS, SUCH AS HER SERVICE ON THE EQUITY, DIVERSITY, AND INCLUSION ADVISORY BOARD AT THE BANFF INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH STATION.
Guilty by association.
The stunt is to censor these words, since even irrelevant mention of them will trigger a dumb filter.
It doesn't matter if the research is on the topic of DEI; if those words are mentioned, it's a slippery slope into wokedom, which is VERBOTEN.
The "database" released by Ted Cruz is particularly egregious about it – you can toss a dart at any row, read the reward description, and bet on whether the topic is actually "DEI".
My favorite one is Award #2303483: "COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: USING A COMBINED BASIN ANALYSIS, ISOTOPIC, AND MODELING APPROACH TO RECONSTRUCT THE LGM THROUGH EARLY HOLOCENE HYDROCLIMATE FOR GLACIAL LAKE MOJAVE."
My second favourite is Award #2227091 "CAREER: VERSATILE WEARABLE ROBOTS FOR REHABILITATION OF CHILDREN WITH GAIT DISABILITIES". Think of the children!
> The problem is wokists try to penetrate everything. It’s basically mission impossible to remove them.
Ah yes "they are everywhere"
> Is it over-heavy-handed? Yes. e been a thing in the first place? No.
So being inclusive and introducing new people who have not been exposed to e.g. advanced mathematics is a bad thing?
> Personally, I’d prefer we rebuild 10 years of research from scratch, rather than keep a science that concluded it was ok to perform scientific experimentation on children to a Nazi level.
What are you even talking about? I guess we are now in the phase where people just make sh*t up, but don't pretend you care about children, we have seen how you all defended Gaetz an actual pedophile.
Why didn’t she put something about working at a soup kitchen into her grant proposal? I guess because working at a soup kitchen doesn’t in any way qualify her for a grant. But she did put information about “services” at a DEI board, probably because that information can help get her a grant.
What would you think if most approved grants started with “I am a rich white man”? Surely that wouldn’t be the exact reason why the grant was given. But why would that even be in a grant proposal? What if many approved grants contained “I preside over a board of Aryan math”? Would that be totally fine and not slippery?
Of course this helps her proposal, but not because the mere mention of DEI gets it a rubber stamp.
It’s part of her credentials to show that she’s taken an active role in expanding access to these advanced fields. It shows she’s part of the community and cares about the field she’s in.
Working in a soup kitchen and being a rich white man as counter examples don’t work to prove your point because duh they aren’t related to math.
It is either an ad hominem attack, and the attackers probably did not even care that the grant is about maths. Or a simplistic filter in Excel was used to determine 'woke', and there is 'homo' in the title of the project.
It is clear that people flagging these posts have a ulterior agenda. While the other posts have plausible deniability cover for being "political", this is as relevant to hacker news as anything.
I believe that Dang does make an attempt to unflag some of these kinds of topics, but there's also the issue that the discussions can become highly politicised too which is not the stated purpose of HN.
Indeed, higher category theory is a veritable minefield of political rabbit holes.
And who could possibly trust HN denizens, those notoriously toxic and tech-ignorant people, to sensibly discuss such things as a tech oligarch delivering Nazi salutes at an inauguration [0, 1]. Or the same man (wealthiest known on Earth) being given physical access to the US treasury [2]. Or warnings from five former treasury secretaries in the NYT about the danger this poses to Democracy [3], the EFF bringing lawsuits over this (unflagged after many hours)[4], or the ability to even discuss all the false flags which we have been riddled with for the last month [5, 6].
This last month has been a real eye opener. Even Paul Graham and Garry Tan have been cheerleading for DOGE, and it's fucking disturbing that we're not allowed to discuss it on any active thread.
Musk is an Idiot at best and Russian asset at worst. But if I see highly upvoted comment complaining or conspiracy theorizing about flagging, after Dang has been tirelessly and countless times explaining how things work, I flag the thread out of principle.
Let's see, "Homotypical" sounds gay and there's some mention of DEI in the grant. It seems that some AI just flagged this, and the block will eventually be reversed (because it's not actually about anything "woke"). I don't even think a layman would mistake this for a "woke" grant, and I expect it to potentially be reversed. On the other hand, what exactly is the application of this abstruse stuff? Is it worth the investment? Lots of research is actually useless.
> STABLE HOMOTOPY THEORY IN ALGEBRA, TOPOLOGY, AND GEOMETRY -STABLE HOMOTOPY THEORY WAS DEVELOPED [...]
> TO ADDRESS INEQUALITY AT THE K-12 LEVEL, THE PI WILL DEVELOP AND MANAGE A PROGRAM PAIRING UNDERGRADUATES FROM HIS HOME INSTITUTION WITH STUDENTS FROM LOCAL AFTER-SCHOOL PROGRAMS FOR ONLINE TUTORING. THIS PROGRAM WOULD CIRCUMVENT CERTAIN BARRIERS TO PARTICIPATION, SUCH AS LACK OF ACCESS TO TRANSPORTATION AND FACILITIES, WHICH ARE COMMON IN TRADITIONAL OUTREACH
Is this really deemed as "neo-Marxist" "far-left" "nonsense" by Trumpists? Is this the same "wokeness" that Paul Graham was referring to in his latest essay?
It could be argued that people who voted for Trump were in the "not college" spectrum[^1], and thus, they would approve of both the anti-woke and anti-science move.
In fact, I would be as bold as saying that most who voted for Trump (a billionaire of dubious conduct, convicted of all sort of crimes) were not billionaires themselves, and thus displayed a certain kind of lack of reasoning and empathy for themselves.
In any case, that majority won, and they get to strengthen themselves and to make the world more to their image. Expect interesting times ahead.
Even more incredible is the amount of educated people who voted for Kamala in your link. It makes me question what “education” is these days if they put their votes behind someone who is so poor at communicating that her handles had to control everything.
Certainly less interesting times with Trump than the alternative, thank goodness.
It's really interesting to see America doing the same stuff as Weimar Germany. The institute for sexology was destroyed in 1933, so by my counting you've got about a year until you get your Führer.
What really bugs me as an onlooker is that I thought the constitution specified gun ownership precisely to prevent tyrannical governments (e.g. the English) and yet now there appears to be developing exactly that.
Those rights, like to bear arms and freely associate, only exist on paper. That they are in a state of nominal existence and practical abrogation serves to deradicalise and defuse resistance against the government, not encourage it.
At the time the constitution was written, guns were among the most lethal weaponry available.
Not sure the same logic applies when the government has a monopoly on tanks, fighter jets, missiles and so on, which (despite the second amendment’s use of the broad term “arms”) citizens can neither keep nor bear.
Obligatory side note that the actual text of the second amendment reads very different to me than the modern discourse about it. Perhaps the “well regulated militia” bit was just as important as the “keeping and bearing arms” bit, in terms of keeping tyranny in check.
At the moment conditions for a civil war (be it a real civil war or the historical USA civil war) aren't there, a lot of citizens entitled to 2nd amendment rights aren't exerting their right, a big lump of citizens are happy about the current state of affairs.
Trump is pretty popular right now, but ultimately his actions have not yet had any impact on his voters. They like his image.
But the real world will keep on happening. There will be inflation, unemployment, cost of living etc. Ultimately, as the experience of various European Trumps shows, this is what prevails. It doesn't even have to be Trump's faults or successes that buoy or sink him. I'm sure part of the reason he lost his first reelection bid was that COVID happened (and in itself that wasn't his fault), likewise Biden lost because inflation (again, largely not his fault).
Meanwhile, he doesn't strike me as someone who generally handles crises well. Problems will come, ones that materially affect his political base, and he will have to handle them well, or be serially lucky, or lose his power base.
So in short, I wouldn't assume any particular group of people will like him long-term just because they like him a few weeks in. They might. They might not.
EDIT to be clear, I don't wish Trump dead. I think that would be destructive to the US democracy and thus also bad for the world.
The roots of the 2nd amendment are way murky. Two contributing factors: 1) Guns were essential for controlling slaves 2) No-one trusted the US Army (partly because it was heavily associated with Alexander Hamilton)
Not really. The idea of the constitution is that the US government is elected and therefore can't be tyrannical. The purpose of the 2nd amendment is almost certainly to maintain a force for the defence of the country against invasion. It's entirely obsolete now that America has a standing army.
Americans will (and often do) insist that their "well regulated militia" is an absolute bulwark against tyranny, because their government cowers in terror of the wrath of an armed populace. Mention school shootings, mass shootings or any other kind of gun violence stats and they'll lecture you on your naivety, because all of that is a price worth paying for liberty in the only truly free society on earth. They'll wax poetic about "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants," and state “when the people fear the government, that's tyranny; when the government fears the people, that's freedom."
But Americans were more up in arms (literally) over the minor inconvenience of COVID restrictions than this. An imaginary communist plot to steal the election? Americans riot and try to burn down the Capitol. An actual authoritarian takeover of the executive branch takes place...
Because of course the Second Amendment isn't about defending liberty against tyranny, and never was. It's about white supremacists defending their privilege and their franchise for violence against an increasingly progressive and multicultural society, and has been since the days when the "well regulated militias" were used to suppress slave revolts and Native American uprisings.
And all of those guys with all of those guns will be just fine and dandy watching everything burn until the leopards-eating-your-face party finally turns on them as well.
Contrarian view: One "false-positive" example that a simplistic and sloppy "ctrl+F" caught is being highlighted to unfairly criticize a political proposal (in this particular case, dismissing DEI extremisms). This is old as the world.
Of course, the whole anti-DEI movement is based on finding one extreme example and then using it to delete entire government departments and fields of study.
How could it be classified as "unfair criticism" if the political proposal has made a very specific mistake in this instance? Should we not criticise a mistake simply because they are to be considered infallible or should we point it out so that they can learn and correct it? (Assuming that they are acting in good faith)
I'm sure this particular example will be gladly rolled-back. This "aggressive" stategy is working wonders in several quadrants. I recall Milei and Bukele.
At the moment it's simply weird discriminatory cutting of grants by internet trolls, but it's quite likely that all Federal research funding will vanish at the next budget. Leaving that to China to catch up.
The firehose of money won't go away, but you can bet dollars to donuts that it will be redirected right towards a spoils system, where the administration's friends and supporters will be reaping the rewards of victory.
And it won't even be coy about it.
But, but, but..... he had an election promise to "drain the swamp" and get rid of such corruption!
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If Kennedy has his way, will we still have donuts?
It's going to be completely Russian-style oligarchy.
2 replies →
Nothing new under the sun.
2 replies →
Sadly unsurprising, given the witch-hunt nature of recent cuts – Emily Riehl's been a big source of mentorship and inspiration for women in mathematics, and she's been pretty vocal about it. The point is to make a show of stamping out "DEI" for a headline, and to hope that no one looks too closely at the details.
"first they came for" has become "first they fired".
The utter indifference is very distressing.
I think it is true that a subset of HN readers don't want to see stories about politics. This subset may intersect with another subset that is happy to see the things described in these stories happen.
> I think it is true that a subset of HN readers don't want to see stories about politics.
There is a huge subset of HN readers who don't live in the USA, and thus don't really care about political drama in the USA as long as it is not relevant for their own life.
What I'm going to call the "anti woke mind virus" has captured a lot of people: they're happy to burn down anything because they're annoyed about "woke", often based on a single misrepresented incident.
2 replies →
What would you have us do? People voted for this. I’ve hated every minute of this, but they obviously have the authority here. Apart from legal challenges, this very much seems like a “we voted to make our country nontrivially worse off in the long run” scenario.
Trump's approval numbers do not suggest indifference, but more likely self censorship. I think most people were overwhelmingly opposed to all of this DEI stuff, but that can be disingenuously framed as saying somebody is opposed to e.g. diversity or inclusion, as opposed to them being opposed to what DEI amounts to - which is about pursuing equality of outcome, something that is in direct conflict with everything that the Social Rights Movement fought for and achieved.
I think there's also the argument that the government should not be pushing social ideology, period. Certainly not the federal government. In particular if they were just replacing the DEI funding with e.g. Jesus funding, I would be vehemently opposed to this all. But so long as they continue to just cut the funding without replacement, I'm instead vehemently supportive of it.
Self-censorship about their opinions on cutting grants that mention forbidden keywords, even if the grant outcomes have nothing to do with said keywords?
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> I think there's also the argument that the government should not be pushing social ideology, period.
And Category Theory is social ideology?
There’s an unbelievable opportunity for other countries to pick up world class U.S researchers.
The next four years all countries need to do is offer the research funding and citizenship and university positions and entirely new industries and centers of knowledge could be created.
I can only dream of the EU snatching top talent from the US and kick starting a competetive European tech sector. Cloud computing, AI etc. Now would be a great time to take the initiative.
> I can only dream of the EU snatching top talent from the US
This top talent will not be satisfied with the common salaries in many EU countries. Also, it will be unsatisfied that Ireland and Malta are the only EU countries where English is an official language, and in none of them English is the only official language.
You romanticize the EU. There are insurmountable problems specially in the "old" EU members.
2 replies →
Would it be possible for the U.S. to clamp down on emigration too? Maybe threaten high tariffs against countries that take in U.S. citizens.
That would be truly exceptional, but: the US already is the only country that makes its citizens pay taxes when they're not resident at all. (Lots will make you pay taxes if you're partially resident)
They could quite easily take out anti-dual-taxation agreements and try to make US overseas nationals pay two sets of tax.
The existing regulations giving the US global jurisdiction over KYC/AML for Americans can also make it hard for Americans to get bank accounts overseas; that could easily be escalated.
Why would they want to?
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Unsurprising.
I downloaded the linked excel file and this is the description of the first project link I clicked on:
> "COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: CISE-MSI: DP: CPS: CYBER RESILIENT 5G ENABLED VIRTUAL POWER SYSTEM FOR GROWING POWER DEMAND"
I feel like they just go by keywords like covid, 5g, gender, women, climate change etc....
It's not based on titles. Here [1] is the proposal. It included "Furthermore, by employing and mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM, this project will aim at bridging the gap in institutions across the US. It will train the next generation of scholars from minority serving universities and marginalized communities in the fields of cybersecurity, utilization of renewable resources, and machine learning to address the pressing problems of this age."
Previously DEI adherence weighed into which proposals were awarded funding. They no longer do. It's unclear exactly how this is working but suspect they're flagging grants where either the entire point was DEI, or where the project was unrelated to DEI but the DEI stuff pushed it into the acceptable range (and/or drove the grant amount higher than necessary for the underlying science), and cancelling them.
[1] - https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2219701&His...
Interesting, thank you for the addendum! Do you believe it is likely that inclusions of things such as "by employing and mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM, this project will aim at bridging the gap in institutions across the US" result in a higher likeliness of funding? I also wonder if Hacker News would generally consider it to be ethical to use this to increase the likeliness of funding. In this case it does seem unrelated to DEI otherwise.
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https://old.reddit.com/r/PhD/comments/1ihzjsn/keywords_that_...
It's depressing that they didn't even bother to read the actual grant they were targeting.
Very generous of you to assume they have the mental ability to do that.
Wait, they put 5G on the banned list? Are they going to scrap the fifth-gen fighter aircraft too?
The way it’s being done is profoundly unserious, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is politicians interfering with what it’s acceptable to think and study.
https://mastodon.social/@knutson_brain@sfba.social/114000564...
> NSF actually required investigators to highlight outreach to diverse audiences in their grant applications. ( #catch22 )
So it used to be that you had stretch to include whatever little bits of DEI-connection you had in your grant applications (what's the DEI-equivalent of greenwashing?), and now the tables have turned and they're being punished for it. So much waste.
> So it used to be that you had stretch to include whatever little bits of DEI-connection you had in your grant applications (what's the DEI-equivalent of greenwashing?), and now the tables have turned and they're being punished for it.
Lesson learned: as a founding agency, you should never create incentives to introduce politics into research proposals. Instead, you should incentivize to keep politics out of them as much as possible. Otherwise, as you can see here, drama starts to kindle as soon as the prevailing political "wind direction" changes.
But what is political now? Isn't climate science a political issue in the US.
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No Homo... No Morphisms .., No One to Many, and absolutely No Injections.
Why has this post been flagged? Category theory is extremely relevant to programming and this post has plenty of points and comments. Any thoughts dang?
Homomorphic encryption up next.
> Homomorphic encryption up next.
This might actually be a welcome side effect for those in power:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
Sounds like an AI could kinda mangle that title into some sort of critical homo theory and bang your government funding is gone.
Research doesn’t seem like something that will be valued much into the future.
To me it sounds like Elon entered „homo“ into the list of forbidden keywords and went off to other tasks. Hanlon‘s Razor and all that.
They're going to outlaw Lisp because it's homoiconic, is associated with the greek letter lambda, and talks with a queer accent.
This reminds me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
These people have concept of meritocracy like "free speech absolutists" about free speech: just vibes.
> IN PARALLEL, THE PI HAS CONCRETE PLANS TO CONTINUE HER EXPOSITORY AND OUTREACH WORK WHICH INCLUDE A NEW BOOK (ELEMENTS OF INFINITY-CATEGORY THEORY, JOINT WITH VERITY), LECTURES DIRECTED AT THE GENERAL PUBLIC, SURVEY ARTICLES PREPARED FOR A VARIETY OF AUDIENCES, AND EFFORTS TO IMPROVE ACCESS TO ADVANCED MATHEMATICS, SUCH AS HER SERVICE ON THE EQUITY, DIVERSITY, AND INCLUSION ADVISORY BOARD AT THE BANFF INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH STATION.
Guilty by association.
The stunt is to censor these words, since even irrelevant mention of them will trigger a dumb filter.
It doesn't matter if the research is on the topic of DEI; if those words are mentioned, it's a slippery slope into wokedom, which is VERBOTEN.
The fact that the title starts with "homo" probably doesn't help in the newly established Land of the Obtuse Bigots™.
This is an invitation to saturate the field with those words.
And to seek convoluted ways to describe actual work around words the trolls understand.
The "database" released by Ted Cruz is particularly egregious about it – you can toss a dart at any row, read the reward description, and bet on whether the topic is actually "DEI".
My favorite one is Award #2303483: "COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: USING A COMBINED BASIN ANALYSIS, ISOTOPIC, AND MODELING APPROACH TO RECONSTRUCT THE LGM THROUGH EARLY HOLOCENE HYDROCLIMATE FOR GLACIAL LAKE MOJAVE."
My second favourite is Award #2227091 "CAREER: VERSATILE WEARABLE ROBOTS FOR REHABILITATION OF CHILDREN WITH GAIT DISABILITIES". Think of the children!
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/index.cfm? a=files.serve&File_id=94060590-F32F-4944-8810-300E6766B1D6
[flagged]
> The problem is wokists try to penetrate everything. It’s basically mission impossible to remove them.
Ah yes "they are everywhere"
> Is it over-heavy-handed? Yes. e been a thing in the first place? No.
So being inclusive and introducing new people who have not been exposed to e.g. advanced mathematics is a bad thing?
> Personally, I’d prefer we rebuild 10 years of research from scratch, rather than keep a science that concluded it was ok to perform scientific experimentation on children to a Nazi level.
What are you even talking about? I guess we are now in the phase where people just make sh*t up, but don't pretend you care about children, we have seen how you all defended Gaetz an actual pedophile.
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This is just "reds under the bed" bullshit again. Reconsider.
What is "wokism".
edit: > rather than keep a science that concluded it was ok to perform scientific experimentation on children to a Nazi level.
ah okay, don't bother to reply, no point. I missed that "point" when I asked.
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Why didn’t she put something about working at a soup kitchen into her grant proposal? I guess because working at a soup kitchen doesn’t in any way qualify her for a grant. But she did put information about “services” at a DEI board, probably because that information can help get her a grant.
What would you think if most approved grants started with “I am a rich white man”? Surely that wouldn’t be the exact reason why the grant was given. But why would that even be in a grant proposal? What if many approved grants contained “I preside over a board of Aryan math”? Would that be totally fine and not slippery?
Of course this helps her proposal, but not because the mere mention of DEI gets it a rubber stamp.
It’s part of her credentials to show that she’s taken an active role in expanding access to these advanced fields. It shows she’s part of the community and cares about the field she’s in.
Working in a soup kitchen and being a rich white man as counter examples don’t work to prove your point because duh they aren’t related to math.
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Ah, the mathematical field of false equivalence classes.
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"She probably got in trouble for the following passage:
.. HER SERVICE ON THE EQUITY, DIVERSITY, AND INCLUSION ADVISORY BOARD.."
Are you sure it wasn't just for having 'homo-' in the title, that would be too funny .. if it wasn't a travesty.
It is either an ad hominem attack, and the attackers probably did not even care that the grant is about maths. Or a simplistic filter in Excel was used to determine 'woke', and there is 'homo' in the title of the project.
It is clear that people flagging these posts have a ulterior agenda. While the other posts have plausible deniability cover for being "political", this is as relevant to hacker news as anything.
I believe that Dang does make an attempt to unflag some of these kinds of topics, but there's also the issue that the discussions can become highly politicised too which is not the stated purpose of HN.
Yup I have emailed dang a few times regarding wrongly flagged submissions and he has always unflagged them.
Indeed, higher category theory is a veritable minefield of political rabbit holes.
And who could possibly trust HN denizens, those notoriously toxic and tech-ignorant people, to sensibly discuss such things as a tech oligarch delivering Nazi salutes at an inauguration [0, 1]. Or the same man (wealthiest known on Earth) being given physical access to the US treasury [2]. Or warnings from five former treasury secretaries in the NYT about the danger this poses to Democracy [3], the EFF bringing lawsuits over this (unflagged after many hours)[4], or the ability to even discuss all the false flags which we have been riddled with for the last month [5, 6].
This last month has been a real eye opener. Even Paul Graham and Garry Tan have been cheerleading for DOGE, and it's fucking disturbing that we're not allowed to discuss it on any active thread.
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42781604
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Tip, use https://news.ycombinator.com/active
Flagged posts show up there (like this one), so tech bros trying to censor all M*sk and D0GE stuff will not be able to completely silence it.
This forum is mostly tech bros.
The vast majority does not think this is off-topic. Even the ones that support Papa Elon and Daddy Trump.
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Musk is an Idiot at best and Russian asset at worst. But if I see highly upvoted comment complaining or conspiracy theorizing about flagging, after Dang has been tirelessly and countless times explaining how things work, I flag the thread out of principle.
That's great that you are calling "Describing things as they happened" as conspiracy theories.
Also you like to make it harder for the person you are calling tireless
Let's see, "Homotypical" sounds gay and there's some mention of DEI in the grant. It seems that some AI just flagged this, and the block will eventually be reversed (because it's not actually about anything "woke"). I don't even think a layman would mistake this for a "woke" grant, and I expect it to potentially be reversed. On the other hand, what exactly is the application of this abstruse stuff? Is it worth the investment? Lots of research is actually useless.
I still don't understand the meaning of "woke", for example here is one of the grants that are in Ted Cruz database:
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_2414922_4900/
> STABLE HOMOTOPY THEORY IN ALGEBRA, TOPOLOGY, AND GEOMETRY -STABLE HOMOTOPY THEORY WAS DEVELOPED [...]
> TO ADDRESS INEQUALITY AT THE K-12 LEVEL, THE PI WILL DEVELOP AND MANAGE A PROGRAM PAIRING UNDERGRADUATES FROM HIS HOME INSTITUTION WITH STUDENTS FROM LOCAL AFTER-SCHOOL PROGRAMS FOR ONLINE TUTORING. THIS PROGRAM WOULD CIRCUMVENT CERTAIN BARRIERS TO PARTICIPATION, SUCH AS LACK OF ACCESS TO TRANSPORTATION AND FACILITIES, WHICH ARE COMMON IN TRADITIONAL OUTREACH
Is this really deemed as "neo-Marxist" "far-left" "nonsense" by Trumpists? Is this the same "wokeness" that Paul Graham was referring to in his latest essay?
The answer is probably unfortunately, "it's whatever you want it to be, just be on my side". Not defining these things is a feature, not a bug.
It could be argued that people who voted for Trump were in the "not college" spectrum[^1], and thus, they would approve of both the anti-woke and anti-science move.
In fact, I would be as bold as saying that most who voted for Trump (a billionaire of dubious conduct, convicted of all sort of crimes) were not billionaires themselves, and thus displayed a certain kind of lack of reasoning and empathy for themselves.
In any case, that majority won, and they get to strengthen themselves and to make the world more to their image. Expect interesting times ahead.
[^1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elec...
Even more incredible is the amount of educated people who voted for Kamala in your link. It makes me question what “education” is these days if they put their votes behind someone who is so poor at communicating that her handles had to control everything.
Certainly less interesting times with Trump than the alternative, thank goodness.
It's really interesting to see America doing the same stuff as Weimar Germany. The institute for sexology was destroyed in 1933, so by my counting you've got about a year until you get your Führer.
What really bugs me as an onlooker is that I thought the constitution specified gun ownership precisely to prevent tyrannical governments (e.g. the English) and yet now there appears to be developing exactly that.
The gun owners are largely the ones supporting this, because they want it to be tyrannical against Americans they don't like.
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Those rights, like to bear arms and freely associate, only exist on paper. That they are in a state of nominal existence and practical abrogation serves to deradicalise and defuse resistance against the government, not encourage it.
As long as the tyrants hurt the right people, the gun owners will use their guns to protect the tyrants.
[The revolution will be bloodless if the left allows it to be](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/04/leader-of-the-pro-t...).
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At the time the constitution was written, guns were among the most lethal weaponry available.
Not sure the same logic applies when the government has a monopoly on tanks, fighter jets, missiles and so on, which (despite the second amendment’s use of the broad term “arms”) citizens can neither keep nor bear.
Obligatory side note that the actual text of the second amendment reads very different to me than the modern discourse about it. Perhaps the “well regulated militia” bit was just as important as the “keeping and bearing arms” bit, in terms of keeping tyranny in check.
At the moment conditions for a civil war (be it a real civil war or the historical USA civil war) aren't there, a lot of citizens entitled to 2nd amendment rights aren't exerting their right, a big lump of citizens are happy about the current state of affairs.
Trump is pretty popular right now, but ultimately his actions have not yet had any impact on his voters. They like his image.
But the real world will keep on happening. There will be inflation, unemployment, cost of living etc. Ultimately, as the experience of various European Trumps shows, this is what prevails. It doesn't even have to be Trump's faults or successes that buoy or sink him. I'm sure part of the reason he lost his first reelection bid was that COVID happened (and in itself that wasn't his fault), likewise Biden lost because inflation (again, largely not his fault).
Meanwhile, he doesn't strike me as someone who generally handles crises well. Problems will come, ones that materially affect his political base, and he will have to handle them well, or be serially lucky, or lose his power base.
So in short, I wouldn't assume any particular group of people will like him long-term just because they like him a few weeks in. They might. They might not.
EDIT to be clear, I don't wish Trump dead. I think that would be destructive to the US democracy and thus also bad for the world.
The roots of the 2nd amendment are way murky. Two contributing factors: 1) Guns were essential for controlling slaves 2) No-one trusted the US Army (partly because it was heavily associated with Alexander Hamilton)
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Not really. The idea of the constitution is that the US government is elected and therefore can't be tyrannical. The purpose of the 2nd amendment is almost certainly to maintain a force for the defence of the country against invasion. It's entirely obsolete now that America has a standing army.
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Americans will (and often do) insist that their "well regulated militia" is an absolute bulwark against tyranny, because their government cowers in terror of the wrath of an armed populace. Mention school shootings, mass shootings or any other kind of gun violence stats and they'll lecture you on your naivety, because all of that is a price worth paying for liberty in the only truly free society on earth. They'll wax poetic about "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants," and state “when the people fear the government, that's tyranny; when the government fears the people, that's freedom."
But Americans were more up in arms (literally) over the minor inconvenience of COVID restrictions than this. An imaginary communist plot to steal the election? Americans riot and try to burn down the Capitol. An actual authoritarian takeover of the executive branch takes place...
Because of course the Second Amendment isn't about defending liberty against tyranny, and never was. It's about white supremacists defending their privilege and their franchise for violence against an increasingly progressive and multicultural society, and has been since the days when the "well regulated militias" were used to suppress slave revolts and Native American uprisings.
And all of those guys with all of those guns will be just fine and dandy watching everything burn until the leopards-eating-your-face party finally turns on them as well.
Such a cliché comment.
Have you ever considered that something is stated frequently because it is true?
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> there will truly be no way to stop us this time.
…stop you from ending up dead in a bunker with a bullet in your head?
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Contrarian view: One "false-positive" example that a simplistic and sloppy "ctrl+F" caught is being highlighted to unfairly criticize a political proposal (in this particular case, dismissing DEI extremisms). This is old as the world.
Of course, the whole anti-DEI movement is based on finding one extreme example and then using it to delete entire government departments and fields of study.
In the end we just discord in one function: what to do in case of doubt? Cut or keep. Recent examples (Milei, Bukele) seem to favor the "cut" option.
So this is ok then? Sounds like you approve of the anti-DEI approach.
How could it be classified as "unfair criticism" if the political proposal has made a very specific mistake in this instance? Should we not criticise a mistake simply because they are to be considered infallible or should we point it out so that they can learn and correct it? (Assuming that they are acting in good faith)
Free speech and criticizing mistakes is great but there's already comments comparing Trump's US to Weimar's Germany..
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What is an appropriate false positive rate for canceling already approved research funding based on political motivations on a mass scale?
What do you think it is?
I'm sure this particular example will be gladly rolled-back. This "aggressive" stategy is working wonders in several quadrants. I recall Milei and Bukele.