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PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

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Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#381

Post by didibus »

machomaster wrote: post #337
didibus wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is more complex. If groups of people are disadvantaged from birth and then throughout their life, it's unlikely they will be the best at anything. But you could imagine that the person with the best potential was part of that group. In effect, an unjust society that doesn't allow fair equal opportunities from birth and throughout life is sub-optimal at yielding the best candidates for any given role, as it…

You have a lot of incorrect logic. I will only comment on one. > In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to > max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower. Wrong. There are limited resources and it is not feasible to give every person every opportunity. "Let's give everybody a chance to become an opera singer, an Olympic 100m winner or a lotto winner, to see how they will…

You’re arguing against a position I didn’t take.

"Give everyone what they need to max out their potential" is not "give everyone every opportunity". That’s a strawman.

Floor, not ceiling. We set a floor of real opportunity (nutrition, basic health, safety, functional education, accessible selection processes). It doesn’t promise bespoke elite tracks for all. Removing constraints is different from subsidizing every aspiration. By doing so, you lift the average, and allow the best to develop to their fullest, growing society's total output.

If the signal of ability is suppressed by early disadvantage, you’ll misallocate talent. Low cost, well aimed supports (early literacy, assistive tech, unbiased hiring screens) improve matching, which is exactly what meritocracy needs to place the brilliant mathematician in math and the gifted teacher in the classroom.

We have noisy priors shaped by wealth, networks, and bias. They need removed so that comparative advantage can actually surface. That raises both the mean and the max.

We're talking about true meritocracy: merit, not circumstances.

Funnily enough, we agree:

> giving extra resources to worse people (with lower potential) is a waste of resources (money, human)

That's exactly my point, currently we spend resources on a bunch of people that are only circumstantially better, remember pro-sports before black people were allowed?

Spend your resources to realize the best to be the best, and to make even the worse better. That gives you full global maximum.

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

#382

Post by pseudalopex »

machomaster wrote: post #352
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"so much of the political violence (and celebration thereof) is on the left in the US" Biiiiiiiig citation needed. By every available metric, right-wing terror attacks dominate the political violence numbers in the US. I don't know what fantasy world you've been living in, but frankly it sounds pretty sweet to me. And mass violence is a worse problem than targeted violence. Whether or not you think they deserved it,…

You should check what constitutes the "right-wing terror attacks". You will be surprised to know that they include attacks made by Islamic radicals.

The analyses I saw separated right wing, left wing, and Islamist.

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

#383

Post by spankalee »

mjburgess wrote: post #305
spankalee wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers. > The mission explicitly calls for engineering a racial and ethinic composoition to the user base. If you're going to lie, don't refute yourself right before the lie.

What does 'facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers' mean? Here 'diversity' refers to race/ethnicity. If you don't think so, the PSF do, because its their explicit reason for their lawyers declining the grant. It's also the plain meaning of the term in this context. Yes, the foundation for a programming language has a mission which involves the racial composition of its use…

You're the one applying that extremely narrow definition of diversity here.

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

#385

Post by int_19h »

paloblanco wrote: post #5

1.5M is a laughably small number compared to the value that financial institutions extract from just having PyPi available. I know my company, not financial but still large, has containers hitting it every day. How do we get these groups to fork over even just a small amount?

From what I've seen in large tech companies, if they bother to do anything at all, you get a token "open source fund" which is then divvied up between different projects, often according to employee feedback. However the money is peanuts so it's clear that this is not a long term support strategy but just a way to placate the employees and say that "We PROUDLY support Open Source!" etc.

Also (and ironically), in the past, this kind of stuff often did have a DEI component of its own. Meaning that a fair bit of that fund would go not to high profile projects, nor to the ones that company actually uses the most, but to whoever can put together a proposal ticking the most "diversity" boxes.

Either way, the point is that companies are simply uninterested in extending any sort of meaningful support, nevermind doing so in proportion to utility derived. And, honestly, why would they? Economically speaking there's no upside to it so long as you can enjoy the benefits regardless and rely on others to prop things up. And ethically speaking, large organizations are completely and utterly amoral in general, so they will only respond to ethical arguments if these translate to some meaningful economic upsides or downsides - and the big corps already know from experience that they can get away with things much worse than not contributing to the commons. It's not like people will boycott, say, Microsoft over its recent withdrawal of support from Python.

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

#386

Post by a456463 »

actionfromafar wrote: post #362
jkelleyrtp wrote: post #320

In high school, I ran a robotics team that did lots of STEM outreach. We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code." I think we played an important role in the community. In our mission we stated we wanted to help bring "equity to STEM education." In 2025, according to the current admin's stance on "DEI," my robotics team would not be able to receive gra…

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

#387

Post by zb3 »

jkelleyrtp wrote: post #320

In high school, I ran a robotics team that did lots of STEM outreach. We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code." I think we played an important role in the community. In our mission we stated we wanted to help bring "equity to STEM education." In 2025, according to the current admin's stance on "DEI," my robotics team would not be able to receive gra…

You state no details.. but things like "girls who code" sound discriminatory. What about outreach to people who can't learn to code for example because they're not wealthy enough?

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

#388

Post by endemic »

zb3 wrote: post #387
jkelleyrtp wrote: post #320

In high school, I ran a robotics team that did lots of STEM outreach. We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code." I think we played an important role in the community. In our mission we stated we wanted to help bring "equity to STEM education." In 2025, according to the current admin's stance on "DEI," my robotics team would not be able to receive gra…

You state no details.. but things like "girls who code" sound discriminatory. What about outreach to people who can't learn to code for example because they're not wealthy enough?

So we shouldn’t focus on helping a subset of people because doing so is discriminatory to everyone else?

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

#390

Post by AnimalMuppet »

endemic wrote: post #388
zb3 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You state no details.. but things like "girls who code" sound discriminatory. What about outreach to people who can't learn to code for example because they're not wealthy enough?

So we shouldn’t focus on helping a subset of people because doing so is discriminatory to everyone else?

Well... if you're getting a grant to help group X (which is in need), and you're not helping group Y (that is also in need), that should be all right (one organization probably can't do everything). But there maybe ought to be someone else getting a grant to help group Y.
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