In particle physics we usually use these terms which will be at any proposal. This is an interesting textbook definition of false positives when you have list that is using too common words.
- Minimum "Biased" data
- "Discrimination" or "Discriminatory" variables
- Phase space "excluded"
- "Inclusion" of data/variable/anything
- "inequality" -> wow bell's inequality and all this theory work about inequalities will be triggered
These are just example that came into my mind from quick thought and skimming. I'm pretty sure that this will have much worst false positive rate. I would really be surprised if the vast majority if not all of projects get flagged. I'm also sure that 100% of statistics work or project heavily reliant on statistics (probably everything else too) will be flagged.
You're not wrong about the words not being banned, but that's not what the person you're responding to claimed.
I'll also note that being flagged for further scrutiny can effectively end a project that requires disbursement of funds in a timely manner. Ask me how I know, and I'll tell you that I was looking for work last week, because the projects I work on would not have been able to pay me next month if the executive order had not been rescinded. This isn't my speculation, it's what we were told by leadership. These projects are not at all DEI-related, but a shotgun approach to halting disbursal until we're convinced otherwise would have caused a lot of projects to go tits up in the interim. Grant-funded science projects generally do not have huge cash reserves to pay employees until the money spigot turns on again. So, applying a filter blacklist can be very destructive, just by creating temporary false positives.
The words searched are so common that it could literally flag a sizeable portion of all of science and such flags are liable if the trend continues to be handled by political hacks with zero expertise and expansive targets for cuts.
Heavy collateral damage is incredibly likely.
Also research with the wrong ideological underpinning can't violate anti-discrimination laws even if one imagines erroneously that application of same in hiring would despite prior supreme court findings.
Lastly over zealous punative punishment of lawful speech leading to aggressive self censorship is a entirely legitimate concern.
The logical result is suppressing the sciences. It is in fact the very same political correctness oft decried by nazis and bigots weaponized against everyone who isn't a christian white male.
> Reading comprehension is shocking, not just in you but most people here. The post just said "can cause a grant to be pulled". That's entirely consistent with this list being a screening filter and somebody will look at what the grant/application is actually for.
Both the post and the comment you are replying to used the term "flagged". Best I can tell, they aren't claiming what you seem to think they are claiming.
That's true. I was really generally replying to other comments but put it on this one because it was quite specific. You're quite right, an internal flag isn't a ban.
Their reading comprehension is just fine. The whole point of directives like this is the arbitrary nature by which they can be enforced. When everything can be flagged for review by a political commissar...
In the last century, neither fascists or stalinists had any issue with banning 'Jewish' science, despite it having absolutely nothing to do with race. Because their goal was getting rid of the enemies of the administration.
Where is the government going to find all these censors with working minds? No American would consent to doing that unless their zeal had blinded them from something much more important than the compliance of a physics paper.
I remember how "master" and "slave" were banned a few years back in information technology context and people cheered that ban. And surprise surprise, the same mechanism of arbitrary bans can be turned 180 degrees. And it appears that if the only criteria is a superficial offense at the established word unrelated to the imaginary offense, then many different people can use that same mechanism to ban or attack whatever they want. From all sides of the political spectrum. Who knew, right?:)
PS: I'm against any word bans with a very few extreme exceptions. Blanket bans for whatever random person deems offensive inevitably led to this^. Like clockwork, every single time.
There was never a ban like this on the master-slave terminology. A lot of places started moving away from those terms, but plenty of others just kept the old naming. There was no top-down directive from the federal government like there is here - I don't think it's fair to compare them as if they are equivalent situations. This is heavy-handed in a way that makes peer pressure look completely benign in comparison.
A lot of people like to focus very exclusive on the aspect if its top-down, with the implied message being that censorship is acceptable as long its done by companies or community leaders rather than government. Yes, it is worse when it is done by governments. But no, it doesn't make censorship acceptable. So much debate happens because some people view all censorship as bad, that is rules intended to inhibit speech and shutdown wrong-thinking, while others want to distinguish between government censorship and "good" censorship. As someone who stand in the "all censorship as bad" category, there is no good censorship! Only grades of wrong.
Different wrongness do get compare. That doesn't make very very very wrong to be equivalent to just very wrong. Both are however wrong. The kind of censorship and self-censorship we have seen in science, popular media and even humor in the last few decades has been insane compared to the decades previous. To throw in a random example, someone who criticized religion was murdered a few days ago in Sweden, and as a society we kind just expected it and waiting for it to happen. Something like Monty Python could not exist today as they would had either been censored or murdered, and so they would have been forced to self-censor long before their skills as comedians would have grown.
Censorship is not something we can pick and choose from.
Voluntarily choosing not to say something is preference, not self-censorship. For example, some people choose not to swear because they don't like swears. That is just a preference, self-censorship is when you want to swear but don't because of external pressure.
Nobody was forced to stop using master/slave, some companies just chose not to because that was their preference. They didn't want to use the word slave anymore. It's reasonable to call it pointless or performative, but I don't think any of the decision-makers at these companies were forced into it. Most companies did not change anything, and they faced absolutely no consequences.
I'm sure there were some (for example) GitHub employees who didn't agree with the decision and maybe felt censored, but basically every company on the planet has standards for language in the workplace, so in that sense every company is guilty of censorship. GitHub did not force any of its users to do anything, you could still use whatever language you want, and you can search "slave" right now to see how common it still is.
Which is different from saying they "removed", because "removed" sounds like 100% removal. They didn't 100% remove, but that's not my argument, only a strawman of it.
So will you meet me at what I actually meant, or are you going to insist on your own wording that doesn't actually rebut me?
Yes, I think that it is good that they did not touch existing projects. (Much of the complaints (including my own complaints) when it was announced were due to ignorance of the working of git and of GitHub; once I learned how it is working then I do not have complaints about it.)
Even for new projects, if you create a empty repository on GitHub and then send a repository from your own computer, it will work with whatever branch name you give it, at least in my experience (I had sent repositories with the only branch named "trunk" and it seems to cause no problems at all as far as I can tell).
Neither git nor GitHub software cares what the branches are called as far as I know; I think they just changed the default settings if you are creating a repository using GitHub, but you are not required to use them.
And, actually, I read the documentation and you can even make per-user settings on GitHub, and you can change the default branch name for git itself too (and, like in GitHub, this setting can also be changed in git).
They also added the function to rename branches (you can rename any branch, not only the default branch), and they provide documentation about how this is working, so this is a side benefit of their work on this, in case it is sometimes useful to rename branches (although I think probably it is usually better not to rename existing branches, maybe sometimes it might be useful).
Furthermore, "main" is shorter than "master", and starts with the same two letters; but in my opinion, these are minor benefits (although they are still beneficial anyways).
However, even though I think this is good, this does not imply that all software that used "master" and changed it, were doing good. In many cases they weren't good, but git (and GitHub) isn't one of them that isn't good. The reasons why it is good or not good have to do with the existing working of the software and of working of names, and how the changes are being handled, and is not because of racism and stuff like that.
I didn't say they did anything to mainline git's source code.
Hell, I didn't even say they accomplished their goal. I just criticized the goal, not just for github but for everyone else doing the same thing. And the goal is about git repos. Lots of those are on github, and lots of those are influenced by the things github did.
TL;DR: Lots of people removed "master" from git repos.
So because a lot of people chose to no longer use "master" in their git repos, it justifies an authoritarian rollback of science and health? No one cares what their git branches are called. Get that stupid chip off your shoulder and smell the fire. The country is burning.
What the hell are you talking about? I never made any comparison between those.
(I sure hope you're not just complaining that I'm wasting words on it while more important things are happening in the world, because that's pure hypocrisy and applies to 99-100% of comments on this site. "Never do anything unimportant" is a terrible motto. So is "never complain about anything minor".)
> Then you agree that what's going on now is wrong
Obviously yes. Censorship is not something we can pick and choose from.
> and there's no need to bring up lesser wrongs to distract us from that.
There would not be a need for that if people agreed that censorship is wrong. As long people see some censorship as good, rather than a lesser wrongs, the trend of ever more censorship will just continue and this kind of events will continue to occur and at larger scope. Censorship is a kind of political violence that once accepted only expands until the social rules totally breaks apart. It can't exit as just a rule for the government, it must be something that people inherently support as a concept.
The same issue as with some other terms in 21st century. For example monopoly by the 19th century definition would be almost impossible today, because "look, that company has a whopping 0.1% of the market, hence we with 99.9% are not a monopoly". So yeah, it wasn't banned everywhere, but that reached momentum wide enough for me to consider it essentially a ban.
And as a I said below, even if call it not a ban but idk "popular advisory", the point is that it set a precedent. And now right wingers would really ban words they don't like.
Also they may argue that they did not ban their words either. Can you apply for grant elsewhere? Yes you can, technically. "So what the problem"(c) they will ask.
It's different because it's the federal government. You can't compare it to a bunch of companies deciding to do the same thing because of popular opinion. While both processes have their own mechanism for driving conformity, one is essentially democratic, while the other is strongly autocratic.
I wasn’t crazy about moving away from master, but this isn’t a word ban, it’s a concept ban. They’re not really banning the word diversity, they’re banning the study of diversity by any name.
Renaming master to main, doesn’t mean that you can’t do trunk based development, it just means you’re using a different term.
If there was any value at all in renaming it to main, it was preventing people from being reminded of the unhappy concept of slavery. I don't think one ban is more conceptual than the other, if there's a difference it's that scrubbing an unhappy concept from research is more pragmatically damaging than scrubbing it from nomenclature - not because one's morally better, but because the former is more difficult to evade.
I disagree. If people want to call it "main" that is OK and I do not have an objection, although slavery and racism is not a part of it. Using different words does not solve slavery or racism or anything like that.
There are some minor advantages of "main", but many of the previous objections to the change are invalid and based on ignorance of the working of git; once I figured out how it works, I do not have an objection, since you can call the branches whatever you want to do anyways, and the names "master" is not something special anyways except for what it is called if you do not otherwise specify a name. Furthermore, existing repositories on GitHub are not automatically changed, and they added function for renaming branches (which can be useful for other reasons too), so for these reasons I think what they did is good.
Some minor benefits of "main" is that it is shorter than "master" and starts with the same two letters as "master" (which might sometimes matter, e.g. if the branch names are listed in alphabetical order and you want to find them in the list). These benefits seems like only minor benefits to me, though.
However, my opinion about the change in SQLite, changing a table name from SQLITE_MASTER to SQLITE_SCHEMA, is different. I think that the new name better describes what it is for (it is the table for the schema of the database), but I would not have made that change, since it can cause problems. They did consider some of them (such as authorizer callbacks, which is something that I had thought of too before I knew what they did about it), and work around them, but that just makes it more messy, so I still think it was a bad idea, but now it is done and it would not be good to undo this change, either. If I was in charge of it I would have deferred the change until SQLite4, rather than changing SQLite3. (There is also the issue of the SQLITE_SCHEMA error code.)
Yes. That ban (sorry, I still think that's what it was in reality) was a mild one and inconsequential. I personally have no problem with that specific episode.
The real problem is that and other such minor episodes normalized word bans as a general principle. So as soon as more radical people come in power, they have used it to ban what THEY want.
Just like normalizing talks about occupation of Greenland today, will inevitably lead to the real occupation in 20-30 years in the future, by some Mango v2.0.
When you say they were "banned", do you mean a handful of companies voluntarily decided to stop using those words internally and published blog posts about it? I don't recall it going any further than that.
These were not banned. I still call master-slave systems master-slave, and I haven't gotten banned from anywhere because of that. Some people don't like it, and other people don't like that some people don't like it, and some people ban its usage from their platforms, and other people enforce its usage on their platforms, which sounds like a free marketplace of ideas to me!
Yes, we have mandatory linter rules which won’t let us check in code that contains the word “whitelist” or “blacklist” or “master” because they are somehow racist.
I work at the biggest tech company, which employs hundreds of thousands of people and these rules are applied across all codebases.
This stuff is widespread across big companies and the government.
There's a pretty big difference between a private company pandering to progressives by banning a few words versus the federal government suddenly declaring that many different words and concepts are banned. These NSF flags are just one case out of many, similar changes are being rushed out across every federal department. I agree that the word bans at your company are stupid, but the govt changes are a whole other level of bad.
That's just your organization, I meant "all of IT" when I said "all of IT".
There are posters here acting as if there is a singular entity in charge of IT, that forces this rule on everyone.
I don't see what consequence it is that your particular organization prefers to do things its own way. It's a completely different proposition from pretending like the word is banned outright for everyone, by someone.
Agreed. It's groups in multiple camps that want to force everyone to change how they do things. Superficial, performative "action" and causes don't change anything. Let's just be sensible and try not to harm or discriminate against anyone for any of their attributes. How is this so difficult? I think it's that there are too many people who have firmly married their identities to hate of their socially-acceptable (in their hermetically-sealed echo chamber of team red or team blue) scapegoats.
Since what we're looking for is a peace that eliminates collateral damage, perhaps the best course would be to reassure both sides that they can have security without having control.
In my opinion government focus should be on the education of young people, and not on trying to force and bend adults to behave in the narrow "correct" way. Again, with some exceptions. If we want more female representation in STEM - focus on education. If we want people not to use some slur or derogatory term - teach people in the school. And so on. The problem is that across the world education is a third tier activity for the government and is largely neglected. No big profits there.
> If we want more female representation in STEM - focus on education.
You also have to introduce rules for hiring – unless you want your interventions to have an 80-year delay on them. (Or we could make unqualified 18-year-olds responsible for hiring decisions, I suppose.) If you're training children up for careers they're going to be kept out of, you're doing everyone a disservice.
Removing reasonable discriminating items from hiring is good idea, like mandating no photos for example. But we can't remove all of it and people will still be discriminated, even just by name and surname. Then we decide to force the issue and add diversity quotas, but those are both neither enough nor are truly enforced. Then we start creating DEI departments, thought police and... well. It doesn't work very well.
Also in practice these quotas are often put at the lower rank jobs, where there is little discrimination anyway. E.g. IT industry will eat up any good candidate, usually. The problem with quotas is that we can't implement them where they are really needed - in the higher castes of social hierarchy. There are no quotas for CEOs or Senators, or top politicians etc. And really won't be.
So considering that, I tend to think that quotas is a losing game, and only education is the solution. And I mean real efforts there, not some token programs for 30 girls per nation or something. And yeah, unfortunately we will need to wait a lot.
I also think quotas are a poor solution. Pretty much all of the surface-level DEI stuff in the US is – or, I suppose, was – absurd. (Mandatory corporate training where a voice reads out a list of slurs… What problem is that meant to solve?)
However, my experience of DEI specialists is overwhelmingly positive, even those in the US. Maybe I've got lucky, and have only interacted with competent ones: who knows? But if they say a system involving quotas is the best solution currently-feasible – which iirc I have been told – then that won't convince me that quotas are good, but it will convince me that the other options are worse.
> The problem with quotas is that we can't implement them where they are really needed - in the higher castes of social hierarchy.
This isn't a problem with quotas. It being a problem presupposes that quotas work, surely?
Some people will choose to antagonize men or women even after being made aware of the facts. That's why people who are unwilling to tolerate a low level of bad behavior and the after-the-fact nature of punishment wind up demanding absolute and preemptive control over everybody else.
That ban is imaginary. It never existed. Many people decided to use other terms at their free will and others didn't. Both terms can be still found in plenty of projects.
Can you point to where Trump issued a word ban for grant funded research? Not this post, because it's not describing a word ban and it doesn't even seem to have a source.
I can in fact. Trump literally just issued a mass retraction and censorship of research publication depending on a set of keywords [1]. That is, by definition, a word ban for CDC-funded research. In fact you posted in that thread on HN, so you should already be very well aware of it.
I am so disheartened by the term "free speech" in political usage because it does seem to me mostly a rallying call to actually ban speech that the user of the term dislikes. I look to how "cisgender" is treated on X worse that most actual ethnic slurs: https://www.fastcompany.com/91126082/elon-musk-x-cisgender-c...
Very few actually want to apply it equally to both their side and the opposing side.
I did notice this one group called FIRE that actually does a pretty decent job of applying free speech rights relatively equally, I think we should support it more:
I’m curious what will happen to FIRE over the next few years. Presumably a lot of their funding over the past few years has come from right leaning sources and presumably they’re going to have to change their tack with the new folks in power.
Unfortunately a number of the legal minds behind these terrible laws are former FIRE alum, it was a real bummer when I saw multiple resumes with stints at FIRE.
That's literally what the quote says: "From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled". And then it goes on to quote a long list of words that would be characteristic of woke social science "research".
I would flip this back on you. They gave a very good example of these rules being used for censorship with DeSantis prosecuting scientist for reporting numbers. Selective enforcement is a known thing so is your affection for the people in charge stopping you from seeing the obvious problem here?
I support the purported intent of this policy, not the misuse of it. But that's something that has to be challenged when it happens, and it hasn't happened yet. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to make any policy since it could always potentially be misused. For the record I expect there will be some misuse of it, but broadly I also expect it to curtail the fake woke "science" that was itself a kind of misuse of the system.
The tone it sets is that "we don't care about studying anything relating to minorities or people who weren't born with a silver spoon" which I wouldn't call a positive tone.
I was being charitable by asking whether you are gullible or a parrot. Gullible is the charitable interpretation. This whole action has been done on a pretext of lies: getting politics out of science, when it fact is is putting politics into science.
I'd imagine by "official confirmation" you don't mean the government that is currently shutting down their websites, scrubbing data and destroying the idea of transparency. The concept of trust has flown right out the window. If I had to chose who to believe on this topic right now, sadly, it would in fact be this random post on bluesky.
thats not the america i want to live in, but it does appear to be the one we are currently in.
One of the USA's main power sources is controlling the world reserve currency. This means that every other country imports inflation from the USA, in exchange for delivering vast quantities of useful goods and services to the USA. Without this special status, the USA will have to export as much as it imports.
"Controlling the world reserve currency" and "Having a massive trade deficit" are the same word, since trade deficit is how much stuff other countries sent you without you having to send stuff to them, which is how much currency you sent to those countries. Trump says he wants to eliminate the trade deficit.
if you think the term "women" is only relevant in social science and pop psychology, it begs the question whether you are informed enough to have an opinion worth considering.
In 2055, anti-wokeists will have banned "bias," and wokeists will have banned "weight." Following defeat in the pan-Eastern bent ground war, hawks will ban "loss." They will be renamed plusses, and double plusses, and ungood.
I don't support this action by Trump and I am linking to an article that criticizes the Florida bill. But it is trying to explain/justify why this word may be banned based referencing the ideological background that is motivating it.
Truthfully, the words are not "forbidden". Using them in a grant application might decrease the chances of receiving a grant. Nothing stops anyone from using them.
Just like getting demonetized on YouTube, then. Maybe we'll see grant proposals to study "dis@bility progression in Multiple Sclerosis", "light p0larization" and "weights and b!ases"
What I find most disappointing and frustrating is that accessibility has gotten caught in the crosshairs of this anti-DEI crusade. I expect this will lead to a lot of suffering among the most vulnerable groups of people.
Accessibility was always DEI, heck DEIA was a common term too. The entire point of the ADA is (was?) to provide equity and inclusion for disabled people. That's the difference from everyone equally having access to stairs, vs everyone equitably having access to the second floor. It's including people in wheelchairs and who have speech impediments, instead of excluding them.
It's been clear from the beginning that getting rid of equity and inclusion included disabled people; does nobody remember when Trump made fun of the disabled reporter in his first term? He hates them.
I was shown this back in college when I raised concerns about how cancel culture was stifling the free exchange of ideas and when I argued against the idea that speech was the same thing as violence. I guess if this is the world we live in the same thing applies in the other direction.
“The first amendment doesn’t shield you from criticism or consequences”
“It’s just that people listening think you’re an asshole”
It's chilling that the new administration's first priority is to defund projects that don't agree with their ideology, and make an explicit show of it.
That said, this specific post is over-egging the post it's quoting.
The original post is https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:aixj65vnqpllcjnc4ante42b/po... by Darby Saxbe at USC, leaking materials from an NSF Program Officer. She says these are words that "can cause a grant to be pulled". What she's leaking appears to be inference done, over a partial set of "flagged" awards, and the keywords drawn from them. It does not say this is the official list of keywords.
The accompanying decision tree - what the NSF is being ordered to do - says if the "keywords and context" of various parts of the grant application "implicate" Trump's executive orders (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14151), then they must keep the flag and mark that they found "DEIA and other EO language" -- but if not, they can remove the flag. So if you proposed "Systemic analysis of the bigliest cofeve all women find irresistible", you'd likely get funded, because the context reveals you're a big Trump suck-up, even if you used words like "systemic" and "women".
What I get from the original post is the word "systemic" is not actually banned, and may not even be a "keyword" causing awards to be "flagged". But if you're dependent on a grant from NSF for your livelyhood, you obviously want the greatest chances of being funded, and simply not knowing what the orange one is going to fuck about with next, or what exactly he's instructed people to do, is a great cause of anxiety. That's information asymmetry, and it's a form of power in itself. And he's already fucked about by stopping all funding immediately and only adding it back after review. But don't let posts that are also unofficial add to your anxiety.
Standard HN procedure, some people flag it that way when it's unflagged gets lost in 2nd page or behinde. It happens with other "divisive" or "delicate" subjects too.
> Why did this just plummet to page three? Very weird.
People are getting into upvote/downvote wars over comments on the post. When that happens, the HN algorithm automatically downranks the post as likely to drive bad behavior among users.
In what way? This is a list of words to identify applications that the Trump admin wants to deny grants to. Isn't that restricting research quite broadly based on very ideological grounds? This isn't about US research priorities, it is just political interference.
Youvegone through this entire thread calling everyone who points out that the title is misleading gullible or evil.
The title is literally different to the article; people complaining that review is not the same as banned aren't evil in the same way that people who complained about master vs main weren't evil.
In point of fact, I have been asking whether they are parroting lies or gullible.
This type of "review" is simple McCarthyism. DeSantis, in Florida, has shown us how this goes. The Trump admin is doing this on a pretext of removing politics from science, when it is demonstrably injecting politics into science.
Yeah, but we saw this coming years ago when hordes were cheering actual banning of words. I wasn't the only one on various forums who pointed out to all those cheerleaders in the "main replaces master or you're a nazi" camp that normalizing banning of words can only hurt in the long run.
I do not support banning of speech in any but the most extreme cases, but this still uses "review" at least. The previous "master vs main" proponents didn't even bother to pretend that there was any context in which master would be approved.
We've been warning for years, stop being so extreme. And now you, too, gets to see the result of normalizing language policing.
I have never been called a Nazi for having a Git branch called "master". This happening is something right-wingers invented in their minds for reasons yet unknown.
Mods can unflag a story if they deem it important, high quality, giving new information etc. Also "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Perhaps users saw the quality of the comments and chose to flag, or perhaps they saw the quality of the submission.
I also think there's an auto-flag mechanism that kicks in automatically. I don't know how that works, but I'm guessing if I was to write one it would detect patterns of downvotes in comments, number of users who upvoted the submission vs number of comments, and the use of negative and emotional language.
> Freedom of speech does not imply freedom of funding.
The first amendment is specifically about preventing government reprisals for speech. If I would have won a federal grant, but was denied it because I said "trans rights," that's the definition of a first amendment violation.
You're wrong in this case. All you have to do is replace the target and it becomes obvious.
If a scientist currently or previously spammed papers of the form "why Nazis were right all along", we should all hope the government doesn't fund that subject or person.
The mass retraction of previously published papers is ethically concerning, but choice of who/what to fund in future is always completely in-scope for leadership to choose, regardless of whether you agree with the particular decision.
You're too gullible if you think these purity tests aren't going to be applied outside of the grant applications themselves. This is clearly an attempt to isolate out "woke" scientists and researchers, irrespective of what they're researching.
Gullibility has nothing to do with the logical question of "is this a free speech concern or not, and if it is is it in the subset covered by the Constitution?"
You can't oppose chaos while giving up on rigor yourself.
- Minimum "Biased" data
- "Discrimination" or "Discriminatory" variables
- Phase space "excluded"
- "Inclusion" of data/variable/anything
- "inequality" -> wow bell's inequality and all this theory work about inequalities will be triggered
These are just example that came into my mind from quick thought and skimming. I'm pretty sure that this will have much worst false positive rate. I would really be surprised if the vast majority if not all of projects get flagged. I'm also sure that 100% of statistics work or project heavily reliant on statistics (probably everything else too) will be flagged.
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