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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.
Nor do you know who the hard sciencers are.
Way beyond that. Let's go with an analogy. Instead of it being the UK gov't coming in and telling Apple that they've gotta shut down ADP, suppose that was one of the Trump administration's first moves. (It might still happen!) They've gotta get at those horrible wokies who are now using encryption to #resist against the true and proper administration. They just start slashing out at everything. Signal, Telegram, etc. It's all gotta go. Are you going to be first in line to celebrate... or at least show some relief? Glad that the President is taking the chemotherapy approach, so his FBI can go after all the wokies tryna hide their nefarious #resistance?
I haven't looked at that grant, but I'm pretty confident that the vastly most probable reality is that it did exactly that. Again, look, I'm on board with taking away stupid throwaway sentences; I'm on board with way way way more than that! I'd be perfectly happy with what I mentioned in my previously-linked comment; you could conditional all federal funding on them not discriminating on the basis of race/gender... at the institutional level. This would be a huge huge thing, and it would hit everything that universities do, not even just what they put as a throwaway sentence in a grant application. This would actually be focused on the problem. Not just stopping everything, slashing all the funding agencies indiscriminately, and giving the chemo treatment. The prevailing opinion here is that it should all just be shut down, because "universities bad". And, frankly, I am super sympathetic, because there is so much of the universities that I hate. Not even just the wokeness; I complain about their gov't-enforced perfect price discrimination and their stranglehold on accreditation/certification and more. I would love to have so many things change in the intersection between gov't/academia. But, "We can't tell what's good
encrypted communicationresearch and badencrypted communicationresearch, so maybe we just shouldn't have anyencrypted communicationresearch," is not the way, in my opinion.How are you not getting that the chemo argument is a rhetorical shortcut for 'we aren't litigating this because we don't trust you' then? If you can recognise the feeling of relief combined with righteous anger inside yourself, how can you not see that talk of shutting it all down is hyperbolic and some spite? I mean how often do the arguments here go truly outfield as opposed to a slightly modified version of the status quo? I haven't read the whole thread yet, but is there anyone saying "we need to straight up ban tertiary education!"? I strongly doubt it. Trump and co certainly aren't.
I don't know who you think I am, so I don't know why you would or would not trust me.
I'm not sure what else to make of your comment. You think people are just being hyperbolic and angry, and that they're just saying dumb stuff that doesn't make sense? Uh, okay? Then why is all the research getting stopped/slashed?
Nah. Honestly, even that would be better tailoring. Plenty of chunks of those research dollars go to corporate research. There are sooooo many better things you could do if you're just pissed at the stupidity in academia.
That phrase was meant to have quotes around it sorry, I was synthesising the general sentiment of the public into an shortened statement. I'm surprised really, that you would take it personally even without the quotes - you positioned yourself as in support of fixing academia, so why do you identify with them such that you would feel attacked?
In case you think this is me trying to sneakily call you a crypto leftist, I'm not. My image of you is as a guy with a lot of red tribe values who lives in a deep blue tribe situation.
The public sentiment represents the direction of the administration's aim, which sees academia as riddled with the cancer of wokeness, but with a lot of schadenfreude and spite and shitposting in top. I see it as similar to when blue tribers were quietly saying 'I wish he hadn't missed' after the Butler shooting - yeah it's not nice but it doesn't mean a third of the country is going to try to assassinate Trump.
That's how low the trust is. It's not like this is the first time the right has tried to do something about this, but when they tried to compromise they kept getting shafted. Imperfect action is preferable to indefinite wheel spinning, and we have been spinning our wheels for decades.
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I'd oppose that because I oppose the position of banning difficult-to-crack encryption for government convenience; that is, I would oppose the Trump administration's political goals. I do think that's a lot of what's going on with the objections to the science stuff -- the people involved want to keep the no-white-or-Asian males intern programs and the Hispanic outreach and all that.
It's 'chemo treatment', but it's not indiscriminate. It just looks that way because there's so much cancer. The top level post here is about NSFs "research experiences for undergraduates", which is one of those programs that encourages discriminating against white and Asian males.
Even to get at the wokies?! I oppose ridding ourselves of all research, even to get at the wokies.
Please speak to me as a person.
From what I've heard through the grapevine from people at funding agencies, it's absolutely wild right now. And people here are literally calling for it to be indiscriminate. If you disagree with them, then you agree with me.
Yes, I would oppose banning difficult-to-crack encryption even if that made it harder to get at the wokies. But if someone proposed an encryption system that somehow deliberately produced a satoshi a year for woke causes, I'd sure oppose that.
I'm not speaking about you alone. Nor, are you, I think, speaking about me alone when you say things like "people here are literally calling for it to be indiscriminate".
But they'd probably act that way if $1 was being cut, or they weren't getting an accustomed-to increase.
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I assume they're going to try and sneak it in anyway, so an official stance of DEI zero tolerance is preferable. It'll still happen, but it will be less defensible and more subtle.
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