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The academy allowed itself to be hollowed out and started playing politics instead of searching for truth. Yes, hard sciences included.
No, just wanting to keep your head down and “do the science” is not an excuse. I’m sorry for you personally, but academia made its bed and now it will have to lie in it.
Not to mention how many people currently claiming they were "just keeping their heads down" were actually enthusiastic collaborators back in Current Year. I don't think any more funding should be given out until a Truth & Greatness process identifies the most guilty parties.
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The extent of most researchers in the hard sciences' capitulation to progressive ideology is that they filled out the mandatory "broader impacts" portion of a grant application and made up some shit they didn't believe about how whatever they're doing will incidentally improve the lives of women or minorities. It would have been simple enough to remove this requirement from all future applications and most scientists would have been thankful to whichever administration did that. Anyone who had ever been involved with the grant writing process could have told them this.
Denouncing every recipient of such a grant for doing what was required of them to obtain one is akin to punishing everyone in the Soviet Union ex post facto who praised the communist party to keep their job, needlessly making enemies of people who would otherwise be on your side. Should they have had the courage to stand up for their convictions despite the threat of censure or worse? Perhaps, but people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. How many of us here fought the advance of wokeness tooth and nail in every aspect of our professional and public lives, and took all the hits that that entailed? I doubt very many, and this is a place bursting at the seams with reflexive contrarians.
I don't want to throw them in a gulag. But the system that did it has to go away. You get that right? It's not punishment per se. I understand that they don't like it or it negatively affects them. But the institutions have to be destroyed. I don't want these guys in jail or anything. But they'll need to find someone who's not the American tax payer to fund their work. If they are as smart as they think they are, they will be wildly successful in business. If they're not, they will be wildly successful in food service.
Why? Academic science got on fine for generations before woke capture. It's not an inherent consequence of the founding principles. You don't have to hack the arm off to cure an ingrowing nail.
The political process will naturally take any government expenditure and turn it into a patronage program. How are you going to do politics unless you take from your enemies and give to your friends? Since I don't think this thing can remain apolitical, the options are to destroy it or to make it a place to park political allies. Leave it alone isn't a choice.
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No, they won't: that whole "illegal immigrants are harder workers than Americans" thing cuts both ways. Those jobs aren't there for them to take and the various small industrial concerns they could normally do office work for were shipped off to foreign countries 20-30 years ago.
Policies have consequences.
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Why should I believe they didn't believe it? The gatekeepers of the hard sciences were all too ready to expel Tim Hunt (and of course James Watson) from their ranks for violation of that "shit". They were happy to put Alessandro Strumia on the shit-list for opposing it. (and not hard science, but they censured Peter Boghossian for "unauthorized human experimentation" for submitting bogus articles to a woke journal). All public polls say they're strongly aligned with the left on this.
All this is, is taking away the grants which include the praise of Stalin. No one is even being blacklisted.
Perhaps not "tooth and nail", but I fought my battles and took my hits. I certainly never endorsed woke views.
I'm in a hard science academic department. I would guess, in our department, it's about 50-50 those who are supportive vs those who (silently) disagree. We've had DEI speakers at our main weekly seminar (normally for colleagues at other universities who were invited to present their research) and those speakers were praised as "wonderful" by some of our faculty. Our administration requires all applicants for faculty positions to submit diversity statements--plans for how they will promote DEI should they be hired--and these are used in evaluating candidates. One of the members of a recent search committee was a virtual political commissar for DEI. In our last faculty search all males were explicitly excluded (their applications were discarded automatically), on (strongly implied) orders from the upper administration. There are many more such anecdotes. STEM faculty are (statistically) less gung-ho for woke/DEI ideology than humanities or social sciences, but there is considerable support even there.
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If that were all that it was, we would be in a good place. I think a majority of hard sciencers would be completely fine with that. Maybe some small set of gatekeepers at some set of institutions would be unhappy, but kinda who cares? But yeah, that's not all that it is.
No, they wouldn't. Because the majority of them are not even Kolmogrovs, collaborating but not really believing. Most of them are believers. When they were told to add diversity and inclusion to proposals, yes sir. When Trump I appeared #resistance.
The particular thing starting this thread is complaining about impacts to an internship program designed to discriminate against white and Asian men.
I'm going to shamelessly pull the "computer science isn't hard science" card and claim that you probably don't have actual knowledge of this.
That's still not all that it is.
Computer science is mathematics, but its practical applications are very close to the theory, and that has saved it from some of the more embarrassing effects of political capture; there's only so far you can push BS, if it doesn't cash out in working code it won't be respected. That doesn't stop a lot of computer scientists from being true believers and inventing (I don't say corrupting, because that would imply there was a time they were legitimate) whole subfields like "AI safety" which are political.
As for hard science, not only have we seen hard scientists discipline their own for opposing the left, even when the right was titularly in charge, we have not seen some upswelling of support or even relief. No "thank goodness, President Trump is taking away these bullshit diversity requirements which have been weighing on us". We haven't even seen grumbling of the sort "Oh shit, now the new boss is in town and we're going to have to rewrite the proposals to butter him up instead of the other guy". Instead it's "Oh, no, science will end because we're going to lose internship programs for women and non-white-and-Asian males!" And of course there's all those polls of academia showing an extreme left bias, and other polls saying they wouldn't hire conservatives, and that sort of thing.
From what I remember of the early 2000s, the AI safety movement didn't come from academia at all. Am I misremembering?
The present-day field of "AI safety" does not have roots in the 2000s movement of the same name, nor does it share its concerns.
Present-day AI Safety can be pithily described as "making a chatbot that would never say it loved racism". The 2000s movement can be called AI NotKillEveryoneism to distinguish it from that (though the name never caught on for some reason).
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I disagree with this - CS is very captured. The close connection between theory and practice might have kept the practice of the discipline close to reality, but the culture has been completely taken over, probably because by its nature, it is so much more "online" than other disciplines. I would speculate that it is probably the most LGBT-friendly discipline on account of its feed-in cohort being primarily online weirdos, support for transgenderism going back to when the graybeards were young, etc. I'd metaphorically bet on it having the highest raw numbers of trans people too (see e.g., the Rust community survey.) The industrial side has also been taken over - see all the codes of conduct, the big tech companies at the forefront of DEI pushes, etc.
This is a discipline that has the ability to cross-cut everything ("software is eating the world") and possibly even invent superintelligence. If you do not share its values, the fact that it is so thoroughly converged is not a happy one.
Yes, I didn't say it wasn't. I said it was saved from some of the effects of capture. No one is putting forth papers of postmodern critical theory and claiming it's computer science. Well, almost nobody.
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Not the way most of your ilk view it. It's about information, use/transfer thereof. They claim to be in charge of information, so of course, they're extremely susceptible to politics. Basically every part of it. Even the politics that you like (the libertarian-bent crypto folks, for example). It's all politics, through and through. Not so with the hard sciences.
I was all sorts of ready for relief, until approximately day one of when that relief was supposed to come, and instead, all and any hard science was suddenly on the chopping block. "Cut it all, indiscriminately," I keep hearing over and over again. I would have loved to have some relief. I would have loved to cheer on the clean-up of any problems. I was genuinely excited. But those hopes were swiftly crushed. We got chemotherapy instead. I don't know how much you know about chemotherapy, but ya don't actually feel relief when you get the first dose. Like, maybe it'll work in the long run; I don't actually know yet. But it would be pretty dumb to unilaterally decide that someone needed chemo, force the drugs into them, then turn around and say that you're actually justified in just killing them entirely because they're not showing relief yet.
I don't think you know who my "ilk" is.
If you mean things like the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, yes, those are political. In as much as they are political, they are not computer science. And as far as I know their proponents do not claim they are.
I'm hearing these claims that they are cutting all hard science indiscriminately. But then the actual examples turn out to be that they're cutting "science with a DEI twist". The few cases where "diversity" refers to something other than DEI-style diversity are clear errors, but people are objecting to things that aren't that. Instead, there's circling of wagons around programs because "well there really wasn't THAT MUCH DEI". If the US is to fund telescopes in Chile, that money needs to go to telescopes in Chile. Not 50% telescopes in Chile and 50% outreach programs to Hispanic science students. Not 75% telescopes and 25% Hispanic outreach. And not 99% telescopes and 1% Hispanic outreach.
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Relevant thread.
Already bookmarked. Hah.
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Threadreader link for those without Twitter.
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Sometimes my prefrontal cortex doesn’t make the best decisions, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to sabotage it out of revenge.
Essentially you’re arguing that this is for revenge and implicitly acknowledging that it will be bad for the United States even so.
It's not about revenge. It's that activists have systematically taken over the academy and have been trading on its prestige to implement their goals. The result is that it's not at all clear from the outside who is there to just do actual science, and who is an activist doing activism with scientific trappings. Worse, the academy has become completely untrustworthy, so we can't ask the people who would know; they'd just run cover for each other. So, with a heavy heart, we voted for someone to take a flamethrower to the system and we'll see what green shoots come out of the ashes.
I mean, the rational solution to “it’s not clear who is doing actual science” is taking some time to figure it out, and then making changes. I think that’s what a lot of people expected?
The first time Trump was elected was a vote for flamethrowers. Arguably that’s not what happened: there was a lot of noise but he governed somewhat traditionally. The second was a vote against inflation, with the expectation of more of the first (for most voters). I think people are surprised that Trump showed up to work with a double XL flamethrower rather than more of the same as previously.
Only if time has no cost - a common blind spot of rational solutions.
If I am driving a car and a car appears to be unexpectedly pulling out in front of me, I should react immediately, even if I am unsure at this moment if they will actually hit me or not.
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Doing things slow means people can org size more effectively to fight back and try to run out clock. When the offense is time barred and the defense isn’t, then delay is winning strategy for the defense. And couching the strategy as “be deliberate” is effectively siding with the defense.
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I think people forget that being president is a difficult job, so it takes some time to learn how to actually do things in office. There's no training program, and the executive branch has a huge number of federal workers who have to be trained or hired. Not to mention just forming connections with people. Most two-term presidents accomplish a lot more in their second term than in their first.
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No, the rational thing to do is exactly what DOGE appears to be doing. Axe anything and everything associated with DEI, and then let people resubmit thier grant proposals under the new paradigm.
Those with scientific merit will get reapproved and those whithout merit will get to spend even more time complaining about "right-wing anti-intellectualism" than they already do.
That sounds like a concrete prediction. Care to make it concrete enough to bet on?
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And let yourself get lost on a maze of bureaucracy so nothing changes.
Reason is a tool, it's not the right tool for this job. Not anymore.
20 years ago, the scalpel was the right tool, nowadays it's gonna have to be the hacksaw.
There comes a point when a house is so pockmarked with termites and water damage that the only sensible solution is the wrecking ball.
Are there some sections still good and salvageable? Yes. Could you theoretically save sections of the house? Yes but the time and effort needed makes the opportunity cost too high.
Or to put it in more bloody terms it’s like Iwo Jima; eventually you just learn to throw grenades in every cave and light fires at every entrance. Sometimes there’s enemies there and sometimes not. There may or may not be scant civilians clinging to life in the caves.
The rational conclusion is to not care, and go forward in a workmanlike manner and get it done, and quickly. Delays only serve to weaken you.
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Why? The suggestion isn't "have normal grant reform instead of DOGE". Anyone with sense agrees that wouldn't work. The hope was that DOGE would exercise reason, while remaining the same independent group made up of the same free-spirited people. Are you saying that Musk & Co couldn't figure out a rough guess of which programs are good and bad on their own? How would that descend into a maze of bureaucracy?
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Other times, your foot gets infected, and if you don't cut off everything from the knee down, your entire body shuts down. And other times, some cells in your breast starts reproducing uncontrollably, and if you don't cut off most of the breast, again, your entire body shuts down. The pain and loss of those healthy cells - a majority of the cells that were cut off were probably healthy! - are real and shouldn't be downplayed. But sometimes it's the least worst option.
I'd say that infections that spread toxicity through the rest of the body or a cancerous growth that grows uncontrollably in a way that crowds out and kills the healthy cells are better metaphors for this situation in academia than a prefrontal cortex sometimes not making the best decisions.
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You took professionalism ethics in your education, did you not? About how professionals get social trust and deference due to not only their specialized skills, but the self-regulation they entail amongst themselves to meet minimum standards of competence and ethics to be deserving of that trust, and holding those who fail to account?
What you are seeing is the consequence of a failure to maintain professionalism, and professional accountability, across multiple professions. And part of that is a result of people just keeping their head down when people try to hijack the profession for non-professional purposes. Social trust has been lost, and deference is being revoked.
Dismissing it as revenge would be part of the problem that lost the public trust. You are not entitled public trust- no one is.
To be honest I’ve never seen examples of unprofessionalism or activism in any of my sojourns in the academic world, particularly not among STEM.
I’m sure you can find examples of scientists behaving badly, and maybe a bad apple does spoil the lot, but I’ve truly only ever seen cases where instances of fudging data gets you excommunicated from your career, and several examples of wishy washy politicized (or just romanticized) science leading to pushback and loss of reputation.
It could be that I’m blind to it. But that’s my experience.
There’s several things going on here IMO. One, it’s hard to see all of an institution when you’re inside it, you only interact with and see your local closest nodes.
But also, it’s really hard for people outside to have an accurate grasp of it as well. A lot of the information that flows to the public sphere itself flows through biased mediums. You could easily paint a whole system as Chinese robbers based on an example or two.
So, I acknowledge there could be a lot of highly politicized scientists in some epidemic of science that I’m not really perceiving. But I’m also suspicious of these takes that STEM science is so deeply political at present.
There’s a big mismatch between my experience and what you’re implying, there’s probably a reality inbetween our two positions but I’m almost certain that the extreme view that many here take towards science is not it.
I would counter that I went to grad school at a fairly high-ranked US institution in a hard science and I saw plenty of unprofessionalism and activism. We had
the well-known DEI criteria on hiring and admissions
several subfields (attached to a general cluster of "Science and Technology Studies") that were fed from the department's common funding pool and openly advocated for the full range of clichés from exploring connections between Marxist theory and [area that you would think has nothing to do it] to criticising $discipline because its usage of hard mathematical formalisms is exclusionary to women and minorities (this was an actual talk that a PhD student with them was invited to give at a $discipline retreat!)
undergrads who agitated against in-class exams and generally any form of assessment that is somewhat resilient against cheating with SJ lingo about stress and disparate impact, and deferred to them
profs joining organisations such as the UCS, which directly aim to leverage their academic status for partisan ends
pronoun pressure in internal email threads, Zoom meetings etc.
...and of course, there is the general wagon circling between everyone under the umbrella of "academia". I am not in medicine, but suggesting that it is sketchy that several of the core actors on the US side who were cited as authorities on the COVID lab leak question had clear conflicts of interest was treated as somewhat traitorous by many in my social environment, and conversely it was seen as good and pro-social to participate in outreach activities such as participating in a meeting at some local town hall to assure people "as a scientist" that the expert position (that we had no special expertise on) must be believed.
The best thing I can say in its defense is that the core mechanism of inward-facing capital building, that is, publication at conferences and in journals, has not been ideologically subverted yet (in our particular area - I gather that the situation is quite different in e.g. genetics). The closest they got was attaching workshops of the form "social issues in X" with their own acceptance criteria to prestigious conferences, but participation in those generally did not translate to any respect in the field proper (though it may be useful/necessary to clear some diversity statement criteria at later career stages, which I dodged as I returned to Europe).
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I did not read it this way.
Read it moreso as "just because you're a healthy cell in a gangrened limb doesn't mean the correct decision isn't to amputate if necessary".
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