PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program • Hacker News Board

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#161

Post by burkaman » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 5:31 PM UTC

XCabbage wrote: post #125

A point made deep in a comment thread by user "rck" below deserves to be a top-level comment - the clawback clause explicitly applies ONLY to violations of existing law: > NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott. So there's no…

Why was the clause included if it's completely redundant? PSF's decision is based on the government's demonstrated track record of what they consider to be "illegal DEI", not what the law actually says. Grant cancellations have been primarily based on a list of banned words (https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-...), and of course nobody involved with any of the thousands of cancelled grants has been charged with breaking a law, because they haven't broken any.

Here's a list of math grants identified by the Senate to be DEI-related because they contained strings like "homo" and "inequality": https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1ioo2x9/database_of_w...

Here's the actual list of NSF cancelled grants: https://www.nsf.gov/updates-on-priorities#termination-list. You can also explore the data at https://grant-witness.us/nsf-data.html. There are 1667 in there, so I'll just highlight a couple and note the "illegal DEI":

- Center for Integrated Quantum Materials

- CAREER: From Equivariant Chromatic Homotopy Theory to Phases of Matter: Voyage to the Edge

- Remote homology detection with evolutionary profile HMMs

- SBIR Phase II: Real-time Community-in-the-Loop Platform for Improved Urban Flood Forecasting and Management

- RCN: Augmenting Intelligence Through Collective Learning

- Mechanisms for the establishment of polarity during whole-body regeneration

- CAREER: Ecological turnover at the dawn of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event - quantifying the Cambro-Ordovician transition through the lens of exceptional preservation

When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal, knowing in your heart that they're wrong is not very helpful.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#162

Post by kristjansson » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 5:34 PM UTC

theschmed wrote: post #2

Read to the end. Ways to financially support this important work can be found there.

Step One: get them to a better payment processor than PayPal! I waded through it, but that's a high friction funnel.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#163

Post by drstewart » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

dangus wrote: post #149

drstewart wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am going to going even further than you and suggest if you are an American do not support America First, that means you instead support America Last. If you believe that, you should think about what other countries and groups support those kinds of things, and what kind of company supporting terrorist groups puts you in. No, there isn't a legitimate reason not to want America First. Yes, it's important we call out…

America first I assume now means “South America First” in regard to financially bailing out Argentina in exchange for political favors.

Yes, better than getting nothing in return for those billions by giving them out to warlords in Africa for luxury cars and airplanes... I mean "aid"

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#164

Post by mrguyorama » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 5:51 PM UTC

philipallstar wrote: post #76

dangus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I am going to add my own stronger language than yours: if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion. This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking. It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of…

>It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else.

No human being has ever objectively evaluated a candidate on their "merits" and ignored their ethnicity, sex, etc.

That's not how the human brain can work.

That does not mean I support the "if you aren't with us, you're against us" ideology, but this absurdist belief that the majority of humans do a good job of avoiding prejudice has never ever been supported by reality.

If that were true, American race based slavery would not have been controversial, it would have been utterly undoable. It was possible because it is trivial for the human brain to dehumanize others. It's an integral part of our brain that was used for generations to maintain social alignment. It doesn't go away just because we banned slavery.

Human biases are so bad, most of the point of science is to stop trusting human reasoning at all.

We have to triple blind studies with medicine, because despite everyone involved being fairly educated in the domain, they will still fuck up data with their biases. Doctors will accidentally fuck up a drug trial because they are human. They don't want to, because they know that would be a huge waste of resources and time and human labor, but they do because the brain doesn't care what you think you want. It isn't constructed to.

And I'm not talking bias as some political bullshit. I'm talking bias as in, human beings will reliably make the same statistical mistakes because our brains overfit a few data points all the damn time, and only attempt to even fit data points after we've already made up our mind.

Statisticians will still experience gambling fallacies.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#165

Post by aalimov_ » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 5:57 PM UTC

pavon wrote: post #128

qcnguy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Its not fraud. The grant proposal accurately describes the research occurring, and people evaluating the grant will have no misconception about what they are funding. The problem is that political appointees have been applying dumb keyword searches which block research that has nothing to do with the issues they object to. Like using privilege in the computer security sense. Or bias in the statistical sense, unrelate…

Take a look at the comments left by that profile. I don’t think that they would be able to understand what you are saying here, all they see is red.

A partial recent comment “qcnguy” made: “DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Requiring the PSF to dump DEI if they want the money is good for everyone, because DEI is bad for people”

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#166

Post by moomin » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 6:05 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #153

japhyr wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Much of the DEI work stems from people looking around a decade or so ago at tech conferences, and noticing that they were almost entirely comprised of men. There's way too much to address in a single comment, so I'll share one specific thing the Python community has done over the past ten+ years that's made a world of difference: The talk proposal process has b…

>> The talk proposal process has been standardized so identifying information is hidden in the first round of reviews Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI. The people opposing DEI [claim to] want qualifications to matter and race/gender/whatever issues not to.

True meritocracy and true DEI are the same thing.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#167

Post by qcnguy » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 6:13 PM UTC

pavon wrote: post #128

qcnguy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Its not fraud. The grant proposal accurately describes the research occurring, and people evaluating the grant will have no misconception about what they are funding. The problem is that political appointees have been applying dumb keyword searches which block research that has nothing to do with the issues they object to. Like using privilege in the computer security sense. Or bias in the statistical sense, unrelate…

[flagged]

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#168

Post by 1121redblackgo » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 6:13 PM UTC

anon84873628 wrote: post #115

1121redblackgo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Pretty sure it was an attempt at satire or reductio ad absurdem.

I'm not sure it was

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#169

Post by qcnguy » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

takluyver wrote: post #127

qcnguy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The requirements the GP is describing are to avoid using certain words. It's not fraudulent to describe the same work without using the banned words.

That's definitely not the requirement! The requirement is to avoid doing certain kinds of "research" that the government disagrees is valid research to fund, characterized by the principles underlying it.

They may have started by using certain keywords to find examples of such grants to terminate, but the requirement itself has nothing to do with words and everything to do with the intentions.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#170

Post by rsynnott » Mon, Oct 27, 2025, 6:19 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #153

japhyr wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Much of the DEI work stems from people looking around a decade or so ago at tech conferences, and noticing that they were almost entirely comprised of men. There's way too much to address in a single comment, so I'll share one specific thing the Python community has done over the past ten+ years that's made a world of difference: The talk proposal process has b…

>> The talk proposal process has been standardized so identifying information is hidden in the first round of reviews Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI. The people opposing DEI [claim to] want qualifications to matter and race/gender/whatever issues not to.

> Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI

... I mean, that's because they're the same thing, presuming that you use the literal definition of 'meritocracy'. Now, 'meritocracy' is sometimes used to mean "only hire straight white guys who went to one of about four universities", but that it is being used as a euphemism, not in its literal meaning (however, these days it is so often used in that euphemistic sense that it has become honestly pretty pointless as a term.)