Despite all the hyperbole in this thread I will try to speak plainly. It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc. I'm sure most people choose to close their eyes to such things and move on and focus on the actual important work but there must be unimaginable waste going on in addition to unethical race based preferences.
What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
141–150 of 1001 posts
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you asking about the Nazis in Germany? The first major book burning was in Berlin at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) where they burned thousands of books containing information about, among other things, LGBT people. Or are you asking about the current situation? They’re trying to burn all of it —- any research papers funded by the NSF or NIH.
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They lied and lost all trust.
Yeah, I remember when the CDC told you that horse paste cures COVID, and proposed grants to study the potential benefits of injecting bleach.
Oh, wait, that wasn't the CDC, was it? That was somebody else. Do you still trust them?
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#143Despite all the hyperbole in this thread I will try to speak plainly. It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc. I'm sure most people choose to close their eyes to such things and move on and focus on the actual important work but there must be unimaginable waste going o…
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Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#144Part of me thinks this is just incompetence. People put in charge to "change" things without knowing what the thing is or does and just randomly mashing buttons.
I contend that there existed too much incompetence across what the government has been funding. I’m looking forward to a ‘change’ for more competence, efficiency, innovation, accountability, etc
The process is the problem. There is no oversight and accountability for Musk and his "DOGE". That's pure poison to Democracy and to a functioning society.
Musk is neither competent nor efficient. He looks at line items and makes stuff up. He destroys a hundred useful things to destroy a bad one. Details don't matter to him. Its the same con man mentality that feeds off the works of his workforce. People who think he is a genius are gullible.
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#145Despite all the hyperbole in this thread I will try to speak plainly. It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc. I'm sure most people choose to close their eyes to such things and move on and focus on the actual important work but there must be unimaginable waste going o…
Do you have any verifiable numbers to back up the impact?
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The cynic in me thinks that the US is going to roll over and take this fascist shake down. The optimist in me thinks that the people will rise up with a resounding NO and do something about it. Right now I'm not sure which I believe. At this point, almost certainly the former. 1. Most Trump supporters do not think that there is a problem. 2. “Regular people” — that is, the folks who don’t track news — won’t notice…
From what I gather, life for most of these "regular people" in Germany was still very much in the tolerable range until well into WWII. This was a very weird realization and one that left me pretty sad. Edit to clarify: I also mean no condescension toward "regular people".
The old quote, "first they came for ..." was written by a Nazi sympathizer -- until he was in jail by them. It's rooted in truth how it played out to him.
"First they came for DEI and I didn't speak out, because I was not Black..."
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#147just two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910829 the problems that led to these frauds are structural --no amount of patching the system will fix this. maybe we should consider the possibility that we are due for a refactor, which is often painful, but especially painful for people (or code) with an entrenched incentive to continue existing. i dont mean to defend what the administration is doing but I…
> no amount of patching the system will fix this.
> maybe we should consider the possibility that we are due for a refactor
People in tech need to stop with those analogies. A government is not a codebase. You can not apply the principles of "refactoring" and "patching" in the same way. It just doesn't work like that. But the problem is we have a bunch of people (some malicious, some clueless) trying to do exactly that.
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which bit of that is vitriol?
If I were to be fair to cft the comment does really seem much different than ones which said they can't wait for people to rise up against Biden because he's a communist. I.e. just a short comment throwing charged political labels rather than discussion the actual meat under consideration. I'm not all that big a fan of that style comment rising to the top threads like this myself, even though I likely lean very oppos…
BTW, I have a written many (widely cited) papers supported by NSF grants during my PhD and postdoc. So it's not a political view, my practical opinion is that NSF needs to be cleaned up. A lot of big grant money goes to outright hopelessly useless stuff.
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you don't think being forced to include a statement on diversity in every single grant request reviewed by the NIH was "injecting dumb politics" but you do think that being forced to NOT include a statement on diversity in every single grant request is?
> forced to NOT include == "not being allowed to include" i.e. a restriction on free speech with more worrying implications than "injecting dumb politics"
Really? You see a narrow contextual restriction for irrelevant information in a grant/hiring packet to be worse than compelled speech?