Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaplok | Hacker News Reader

The key quote is this: "most academic work has nothing to do with diversity, so these mandatory statements force many academics to betray their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth by spinning, twisting, or otherwise inventing some tenuous connection to diversity."

In other words a researcher studying a topic unrelated to diversity will need to lie by claiming that there is a link.

View on HN

"Our lab specializes in developing hypergraph analysis techniques with applications in cybersecurity. The success of these techniques will force threat actors to innovate in order to survive. As more diverse organizations are more innovative [1][5][26] and threat actors are rational and well-informed [9][10], we expect our efforts to encourage threat actors to become more diverse as more effective cybersecurity techniques pressure them to adapt and innovate.

As threat actors account for a non-trivial fraction of global economic activity [6], we expect our research to play an active role in the co-creation of a more inclusive and diverse lifeworld for the people of earth."

This is a bad example: local knowledge (popular scams, exploits, software, etc) does play a nontrivial role in determining what the population of threats looks like; this activity is in part socially determined. So having a more diverse crowd of researchers -- with all else equal -- can improve your research group's understanding of what threats are out there. Diversity gives you edge here. Unless of course, the graph analysis research isn't really about the applications and that was just some bullshit to drum up funding.

It was a satirical example of "bullshit" application writing. I personally don't dispute the relevance of diversity (variously operationalized) within human knowledge production institutions.

I do - I think reasonably - dispute the applicability of the outputs of many of our knowledge production institutions to social justice questions. (Just as I don't dispute that there are, conversely many which are).

If we find ourselves in a situation where we can't make a useful distinction between research that is and isn't relavent to social justice, I think we're at risk of our language seeming vaccuous and nonsensical.

No. They just need to say that the research has nothing to do with DEI. It's just like a canonical tag. This whole thread is crazy to me.

I didn't claim I agree or disagree with this. I answered GP's question on Haidt's argument, especially because I found the other reponses didn't do justice to Haidt by focusing on research that would contradict the dominant narrative. As far as I could tell from the article he didn't allude to that.

The question that triggered his reaction is (quoting from the article) 'whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.' Indeed in principle they could just answer that it doesn't. What is left out here is why they are asking this. If the purpose of the question is unclear then researchers may feel incentivised to lie to 'fit' the requirements.

My personal view is that this is much ado about nothing. More likely than not most people will ignore the answers. There will, however, be reviewers who use that to reject papers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com