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DOE requires plans to promote diversity from grant applicants

science.org

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Re: DOE requires plans to promote diversity from grant applicants

#101

Post by javajosh »

dotgov wrote: post #93

I would like to share how I've seen those policies impact people working in the DOE complex. Those policies are referred to as DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) usually, because we love our three letter acronyms. Anyway, here my experience: - I have seen the same woman get invited to countless hiring panels, as hiring panels need to be "diverse". Hiring panels are multi-hour endeavors and take away from her produ…

Well written. You're not alone. There seems to be no good platform upon which to fight back. Trumpism has taken the other side of this issue, but that side is poisoned by fascism, (real) racism, ignorance and the malignance that is Trump himself. The left has potent messaging and branding power - what are you going to say, that you're against diversity? The phrase "men's rights advocate" has been coopted to mean antifeminist. The actual words men and whites can use to fight for our rights are literally taken from us, even as they redefine the conflict as being about gender and race. It's an extraordinary level of dehumanization, and I fear that many moderates are either unaware or if they are aware, rationally afraid to speak out.

Our laws, public and private, should make no reference to gender, race, religion, or sexual preference. Hiring should be done on merit. And this is now the "racist" position!

The DEI narrative is angry, retributive. It says some groups have victimized others (especially whites enslaving blacks and men controlling women) for so long that mere equality under the law isn't enough. This seems taken as axiomatic, obvious, and just. But this is the outcome of a court case against white people, held in someone else's mind and the defendants had no say. This court's ruling is tantamount to a religious belief, because it cannot be challenged or appealed on any basis, and in fact all challenges are treated as further evidence in favor of the ruling, and evidence that the challenger deserves extra punishment, up to and including ostracism.

This trend must be fought by anyone who cares about justice and liberty. Musk called it a "woke mind virus" and he's right, and we need some antivirals, stat.

Re: DOE requires plans to promote diversity from grant applicants

#102

Post by rad_gruchalski »

faeriechangling wrote: post #96
dymk wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re a capable software engineer, you don’t need dark skin or the right genitals to get a job.

If you're a capable software engineer, you won't be negatively affected by affirmative action either. We still care about the issue because it has a profound effect on mediocre software engineers of various ethnicities and with various genitals.

> If you're a capable software engineer, you won't be negatively affected by affirmative action either.

Well, but maybe you will. Because if you’re not “diverse enough”, some more “diverse enough” person, maybe less qualified, will take your place.

Re: DOE requires plans to promote diversity from grant applicants

#103

Post by davrosthedalek »

cat_plus_plus wrote: post #94

How is any of that even helping groups being boosted? If you come from an underprivileged background, why would you want to try to survive on government grants? Pick up whatever pays well with fastest/cheapest education, maybe become an electrician if you are starting out poor, software engineer if you are middle class. Or if women value family and social life over work, why would we want to take that away from them?…

I don't think you quite understand what is done here. It's not grants for underprivileged. Let me explain (I'll start from the basics of the situation, please don't interpret this as I am assuming you wouldn't know at least some of this.). In the US, most research funding at universities and national labs for basic sciences comes from DOE or NSF. From these grants, we pay students (phd students get paid, and don't pay tuition), postdocs, equipment etc. The NSF typically wants a broader impact statement: How does the funding of the grant affect the society in general. Stuff like: I train the next generation of scientists. Outreach to the general population (who pays it in the end via taxes after all). Maybe school programs etc. DOE traditionally was focused only on the research aspect. Now, DOE has a new requirement that one writes about DEI efforts. This doesn't mean quotas (but could, it's up to the applicant), but it requires you to reflect on and engage in programs at the university which tries to help the problem. This also includes that all students are safe. First and foremost, it forces the grantee to at least inform themselves what programs exist already. One example: The percentage of women in physics is abysmal low, but it's still large enough that I can make some statistical observations. In my experience, female students outperform their male peers on average. This is a strong indication that the women cohort has a higher effective qualification cut-off. There are many possible reasons for that, but I want to make sure it's not for stupid/bad reasons. Because we clearly missing out on some excellent researchers there. I am member of an admission committee. Judging the qualification of students is a very hard task, most signals are very noisy. So people build heuristics. It's absolutely possible, even likely, that these heuristics are not fair and select indirectly on race or gender.

In any case, depending how you see it, /all/ phd students survive on government grants. Because that's how the work is funded. It's not hand outs.

Re: DOE requires plans to promote diversity from grant applicants

#104

Post by Bakary »

n0tth3dro1ds wrote: post #23
fny wrote: post #11

This is backwards. We need do this type of investment at the pre-K, elementary, and middle school levels. We need to provide funding to local communities. If all these top tier colleges (I'm looking at squarely my alma mater--Duke--as an example) invested directly in their local communities instead of affirmative action we'd have made far more progress as a nation. Meanwhile, big tech is gentrifying Durham, people of…

Why do you feel like neighborhoods need to be static in terms of racial composition, forever? Science is science? Okay then. Is tech tech? It seems that there are more white and Asian people in tech, and Apple is hiring in RDU. Should they not hire the best technologists? Should those technologists not have homes in the area? By “gentrifying”, it seems you just mean white people moving for their jobs. Why isn’t that…

Let's leave aside the American-style debate around ethnicity for a moment. We know what happens when high-income workers move en masse to a neighborhood. Things get more expensive, and the quality of life decreases for people who did absolutely nothing wrong except live in a place that eventually got settled by some adtech company. The character of the neighborhood changes, and is destroyed in favor of a copy-pasted hipster area with expensive coffee shops. The previous locals do not get the new jobs because the highly-educated workers are imported from other places or work remotely. They do not have the capacity to move easily unlike the new workers.

Yes, you could say tough luck, kids: that's just life and people can move in and out. However, we can clearly see that gentrification is a real concept that people will fight to prevent with some justification and not just some social justice dog-whistle.

Re: DOE requires plans to promote diversity from grant applicants

#105

Post by Bakary »

hotpotamus wrote: post #76
googlryas wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone have a strong rebuttal against DEI issues being a "pipeline problem" in tech? I remember about 5 years ago, Facebook issued a report about its diversity numbers, and it put partial blame on the pipeline problem, saying they basically couldn't hire enough qualified people of certain demographics, and the entire DEI community blew up with how incorrect that was. I specifically remember some ridiculous outra…

I mean, what other explanation do you think there is? Isn't the alternative that for one biological reason or another, white men, asians, and jews are winning the meritocracy of tech? This is actually fairly mainstream elite conservative opinion, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve for instance. Not all that satisfying an answer in my opinion, but I can't entirely discount it. I'd say the jury is still w…

What bothers me about this sort of idea is more the follow-up. Let's imagine for the sake of discussion that we prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that some groups are, on average, less intelligent than others. What then would the people advancing this argument suggest we do as a society? My gut feeling tells me they won't stop at just removing some current measures in the name of meritocracy, but will also gradually impose restrictions and it'll get real somber real fast.

Re: DOE requires plans to promote diversity from grant applicants

#106

Post by Bakary »

remarkEon wrote: post #95
miley_cyrus wrote: post #78

For those who aren't in academia, this is every governmental science agency now. For example just 9 minutes ago (midnight ET) a funding announcement from the NIH just hit my inbox for "a mission to serve historically underrepresented populations in biomedical research that award doctorate degrees in the health professions or the sciences related to health."

Imagine if the Manhattan Project was constructed with these ridiculous requirements.

This could be a somewhat ironic example considering the likelihood that many people who could have contributed to the Manhattan Project were unable to do so due to institutional barriers relating to their ethnicity.

Even some talented people who did work for the Project got life-altering roadblocks later on such as Qian Xuesen.

Re: DOE requires plans to promote diversity from grant applicants

#107

Post by Bakary »

ajross wrote: post #83
Velc wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snide comment, painful to read. Why should he say something that’s not true just to make people think he’s gay? Your logic is flawed.

He literally suggested saying something not true to make people think he's gay. That's... literally the idea! Make the DOE think he's gay, so he gets the perceived benefits. If that was snide, it wasn't me being snide, it was the upthread commenter. And that's exactly my point: you KNOW he's not gay (because of his careful phrasing), and you find it "snide" to suggest that anyone think he is, when he's not. You agree…

The psychological profiling you are attempting here is, in addition to being clunkily shoehorned into fitting the OP's wording, somewhat irritating because it's conceptually equivalent to the idea that homophobic people must be secretly gay, which is detrimental to LGBT people for all sorts of reasons.

Re: DOE requires plans to promote diversity from grant applicants

#109

Post by viridian »

I've already solved this, at least with regards to myself. I'm bisexual, native American, and have an invisible disability, for any form that asks.

I haven't transitioned on paper yet, but may if it proves useful.

I have no respect for these processes, and feel no guilt about my responses.

Re: DOE requires plans to promote diversity from grant applicants

#110

Post by wyager »

googlryas wrote: post #52
fny wrote: post #11

This is backwards. We need do this type of investment at the pre-K, elementary, and middle school levels. We need to provide funding to local communities. If all these top tier colleges (I'm looking at squarely my alma mater--Duke--as an example) invested directly in their local communities instead of affirmative action we'd have made far more progress as a nation. Meanwhile, big tech is gentrifying Durham, people of…

Does anyone have a strong rebuttal against DEI issues being a "pipeline problem" in tech? I remember about 5 years ago, Facebook issued a report about its diversity numbers, and it put partial blame on the pipeline problem, saying they basically couldn't hire enough qualified people of certain demographics, and the entire DEI community blew up with how incorrect that was. I specifically remember some ridiculous outra…

> Does anyone have a strong rebuttal against DEI issues being a "pipeline problem" in tech?

Yes and no - this explanation is partially correct, in that the impossibility of hiring the kind of demographic distribution DEI advocates want causally precedes any decision made by tech companies.

However, "pipeline problem" incorrectly implies that the reality of hiring demography is the result of some kind of process failure (e.g. in early schooling) rather than a natural outcome of culture, biology, etc. (which high-quality research is fairly unequivocal about, although most people would never know this as it violates core dogma of the American state-secular belief system).

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