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Ironically however, this was the result of limited and over-competitive NSF funding causing a race to the bottom for existing funding dollars. Increasing the NSF budget allows the (highly relative) “luxury” of being principled. Clearly, the goals of reforming science and saving money are getting insanely conflated here. I argue that it’s better to do one or the other but not both at once, or you get exactly the current shitshow
It's not "irony", it's "justice".
The idea that principles (be they scientific or moral) are a relative luxury to be discarded or forgone with the moment they become politically inconvenient is cretinous rat-bastard thinking that should be punished.
These people chose to be political operatives first and academics second. Now they get to reap the rewards of that choice.
I highly disagree that adding a single sentence with vaguely DEI-sounding potential benefits to an NSF proposal abstract suddenly makes a researcher into a "political operative". As discussed up-chain, that seems to be the only sin of a large portion of the DOGE-cancelled stuff. I mean I agree that there's some moral failing involved, but you're literally calling this thinking typical of "cretinous rat bastards" and I'm just saying that minor compromises like this are eminently human. It's like being forced to use pronouns in your email signature at work or something. Like, sure, maybe it is compromising your principles. I'm Mormon, I get it, we went through some shit with Prop 8 and gay rights and such and I absolutely admire those moral stands. However, I'm not going to act like that kind of minor moral failing in a flawed system is actually such a huge betrayal that anyone who adds pronouns in their company profile deserves to lose their job... That's just vindictiveness, and of the small-minded variety.
In short, I believe strongly in forgiveness in a society where you have reddit threads telling people to cut off their family for the slightest thing in the liberal space, and calls for unrestricted lawfare on the right. I think it is something both parties need, especially on the granular and individual level. And many NSF grants are for a small handful of professors and grad students each, it's not like all of them are multi-million-dollar boondoggles. And even this moral stuff aside, it's still stupid self-sabotage on a simple practical/pragmatic level.
And i disagree that it doesn't.
Each and every one of these people wanted to be seen aligning themselves with the DEI crowd. DOGE is merely respecting thier wishes by placing them in the set of "people aligned with the DEI crowd" and treating them accordingly.
If you believe in forgiveness, allow them to resubmit thier proposal without the DEI language, and have thier work considered on its merits.
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Then you are mistaken. Submitting a grant proposal to the effect of "I am going to use this grant to do science and also further the interests of the Democratic party" makes you a political operative. If you actually use some of the grant funds to do that (as I suspect has often been done, since scientists don't want to be caught committing fraud), even more so.
Forgiveness can only follow acknowledgement of error. I have seen none of that.
I think you should reconsider your definition of "political operative".
The commerce department published a list of what the $2B in defunded "woke" grants was here. Grabbing a random one in the $1-2M range, we get this one which was funded for $1.6M.
As far as I can tell, this grant was defunded because they said "We will hire two grad students. Those two grad students will teach undergraduate classes. Our university has some already-existing programs to recruit undergrads from underrepresented groups, and so maybe the classes the grad students teach will contain members of underrepresented groups."
That... does not sound like something a political operative would say. That sounds like a PI who wanted to do useful research and was told "you have to say how the program will help minorities" and so grudgingly included a line like "the program will help everyone, and minorities are a part of everyone".
What error would you like that researcher to acknowledge? Be concrete.
Just resubmit it without the "no white boys allowed in our science club" line. That's literally it. That's what people find objectionable. I don't know how else to possibly say this.
Which line of that grant application says "no white boys allowed in our science club"? Be specific.
Do you have a link to the text of that grant application, rather than just the objective description?
Because there's a fair complaint about claims made without evidence, but when randomly selected high-profile examples with public evidence available come about, looking deeper into the matter -- and often not having to scratch the surface that hard! -- shows a lot of stuff getting hollowed out and skinsuited.
((And, yes, there's also the bit where UoI does the greengrocer bit:
But that /could/ have been left off the grant application, and the whistleblower complaints not true. Still, if you have access, I'd be willing to make a bet at some moderate odds.))
I don't know if the grant application is public but here's the NSF page on the award, which has more details including the abstract and resulting publications.
Resulting publications look like real science with plausible important implications for medicine, not ideologically captured garbage:
This is exactly the sort of foundational research I want my tax dollars funding - low immediate commercial value but potentially massive positive externalities.
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What is the benefit of doing it that way, rather than simply saying "we are declaring your people of colour will get preferential treatment void and will punish you if you try to implement them; otherwise, carry on"? That way, proposals where the diversity statement was hot air with no influence whatsoever on how the science was being carried out can go on with their work.
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We're not going to do unlimited gay race science funding. I'm sorry. Just pour so much money into the program that everything is funded is not the a realistic vision of the future. Forget practically reasonable, it's not politically reasonable. This will always devolve into patron-client politics.
Did you misplace your comment? That's not what we're talking about at all and actively misrepresents everything I said with culture war buzz words. My claim is that in an over-competitive environment, attempts to "game the system" naturally rise. That's not indicative of a moral failing on behalf of the candidates (scientists) exactly, it's just a natural thing that happens in competitive environments with poorly set guardrails. It would be mistaken to take attempts to game the funding system at face value, no questions asked. While obviously moral virtue is higher when 'doing the right thing' in more difficult environments, I think we should be careful about how we ascribe moral fault to actors in a broken system. Surely scientists deserve some blame for juicing their proposals with DEI language, but to hang all the blame at their feet is bananas.
Roughly speaking, 1 in 4 NSF grants get funded, which means 3 essentially get denied. Scale-wise, I would say even an increase in the funding rate to something like 40% would have had a disproportionately large effect in decreasing attempts to pander to the left. Also, I think that probably over half of those grants are likely worth funding, no "gay race science funding" required.
Maybe I misunderstood your position. I thought you were saying the mismatch between the number of scientists requesting funding and the amount of funds available put the scientists in a position where they vulnerable to pressures to conform to the current zeitgeist and unable to be principled. And thus, the way to "save science" is to ensure that the funding is less competitive. That there are is more funding being chased by fewer projects. Thus they can be principled.
I am interpreting that to mean that science cannot be apolitical unless all (or the vast majority) of science is funded. If those are the terms, I would rather not fund it.
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