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Comment by thrwawy1234 | Hacker News Reader

I will not miss the “DEI” components of NSF proposals (or the PIER part of the DOE ones), especially having been on the review panel side about 5 times now. It’s not that I disagree with their intent, but the fact that after you’ve read a few you realize that proposers know exactly what they are expected to write there, so they write that there. Those sections are basically a useless going-through-the-motions exercise, and everyone knows it. I’ve never seen a proposal win or lose, or even change positions in a tie break, based on that content. More or less we just look to see that it exists, indicate that existence in the review form, and concentrate on the actual content. It’s a performative waste of everyone’s time.

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This is disingenuous: there is no "DEI" component of NSF proposals. There is a Broader Impacts section which is mandated by law - the America Competes Act of 2010, which congress passed. https://www.congress.gov/111/plaws/publ358/PLAW-111publ358.p... It states that:

GOALS.—The Foundation shall apply a Broader Impacts Review Criterion to achieve the following goals: (1) Increased economic competitiveness of the United States. (2) Development of a globally competitive STEM workforce. (3) Increased participation of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM. (4) Increased partnerships between academia and industry. (5) Improved pre-K–12 STEM education and teacher development. (6) Improved undergraduate STEM education. (7) Increased public scientific literacy. (8) Increased national security.

That's it. I've won many NSF proposals and have never talked about DEI. Instead we talk about outreach work we do with local schools, our involving undergraduate students in research who would not otherwise be able to volunteer their time, and of course the economic impacts of working on these topics.

An executive order cannot override the law authorizing the National Science Foundation and its activities. We are, for now, a country of laws.

A recent Major Research Instrumentation proposal that I submitted to NSF had this required section in the Broader Impacts section [1], where I've pasted the text from the instructions:

Institutional Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion - Using no more than one paragraph, describe indicators of institutional commitment to promoting diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) within the awardee/subawardee institution(s).

[1] https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/mri-major-research...

Is the item (3) what the parent comment refers to?

Who knows? The executive orders read like they were written by children and don't clearly define what they mean by "DEIA". But NSF's authorization is from Congress. Unless congress passes a law rescinding this as a part of what counts as broader impacts, or the Supreme Court rules that increasing participation of underrepresented groups is unconstitutional (by precedent it is certainly not!), then NSF cannot simply change the definition of broader impacts.

NSF is an independent agency, and the degree of control over it which a President can legitimately exercise is disputed, but presidents from both parties have treated the independent agencies as being subject to executive orders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_Un...

Which article of the Constitution describes "independent agencies"? I'm only aware of: Executive, Legislative, Judicial, and State agencies.

They're created by Congress but administratively part of the executive branch, as described in the first two paragraphs of the linked wiki article, and they're independent so they can be insulated from politics and regulate effectively.

I understand that, I just think that's extra-constitutional and shields these agencies from accountability

I believe that Independent Agencies were created by the Progressives of the early 20th century. They were subsequently found to be constitutional, through somewhat dubious reasoning, and it seems like they’re now too big to fail.

Thank you for the thoughtful response. Exactly what I was referring to, they are extra-Constitutional at best. And now the executive is rightfully taking them back under control

I think a better approach would be to rewrite the Constitution, taking into account what has been learned over the centuries. The executive branch should become more like a bureaucracy and less like a monarchy. In particular, department heads should have a degree of independence from the President, and it should only be possible to remove them before the normal term expires by impeachment or if the President and the Senate agree.

Agree in theory that we should try to rewrite our foundational laws rather than twist or ignore them.

Disagree with your specific proposals though. I want more accountability, not less. Your proposals also rely on Congress stepping up, which it hasn't done in some time

The way I see it, the dysfunctionality of the Congress and the rule by executive orders have made the President closer to an elected king than the chief executive of a republic. The US is now closer to a monarchy than the actual monarchies in Europe.

It's one thing to have a presidential republic, because you want an independent executive branch. (Unlike in parliamentary republics, where it's subordinate to the legislative branch.) But vesting so much power in a single individual is against everything a republic stands for. It's better to have an executive branch consisting of many independent departments than everyone serving at the will of the President.

> The way I see it, the dysfunctionality of the Congress and the rule by executive orders have made the President closer to an elected king than the chief executive of a republic. The US is now closer to a monarchy than the actual monarchies in Europe.

This is not new, and not caused by “Congressional dysfunction”, it is inherent in the design of the American system. To quote an editorial in the long-defunct Knoxville Journal, published all the way back in 1896 (February 9): "Great Britain is a republic with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king"

The British historian David Cannadine argues [0] that the American Founding Fathers created an elective monarchy, instead of a republic, in part because from the other side of the Atlantic they didn’t understand that the King was already more of a figurehead than a genuine power, and that the Prime Minister and Parliament were the ones who called the shots. So they gave the President, not the very limited powers that King George III actually had in practice, nor the less limited but still quite constrained powers of the Prime Minister, but a rather large chunk of the much more expansive powers they mistakenly thought the King still had-and their “checks and balances”, despite being conceptually neater than those in the UK, in some ways turned out to be weaker. In 1776 and 1787 (writing of the US Constitution), the modern office of Prime Minister was still a relatively new development-it is generally considered to have begun with Sir Robert Walpole’s appointment as First Lord of the Treasury in 1729-prior to that, the First Lord of the Treasury was closer to a finance/economics minister than a national leader.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32741802

In agreement on the POTUS being an "elected king". My instinct is to downsize government rather than increase independence from the exec.

In terms of realism I'd say our suggestions rank as:

   1. Increase executive power (current trend)
   2. Your suggestion
   .
   .
   .
   X. decrease size of gov

"independent agencies" isn't meant to be at the same level of the "Big Three", but rather agencies that are deliberately created by the Legislative branch (typically) to be as independent as the constitution allows. We don't need the president, congress, and the supreme court to vote/judge on every single decision that happens in this country. We create bodies to do that for us.

I will take the SCOTUS opinion on these laws being Constitutional over an comment on hackernews. We'll see what happens, I'm sure that Trumpy will try and get it to SCOTUS and test such institutions.

That's fair, I generally apply the same rule!

Wondering what your thoughts are on presidential immunity, gun control, and abortion decisions though. Corporate personhood? Civil asset forfeiture?

> I’ve never seen a proposal win or lose, or even change positions in a tie break, based on that content

This is an absolutely wild statement, because my experience has been the complete opposite. I've seen a zillion times where a straight white guy was passed over specifically to achieve DEI goals.

I don't think the pro-DEI crowd understands how discriminatory DEI initiatives became in many institutions and how that's the root of the anti-DEI backlash.

I've lost count of the number of times I've seen the best X (candidate, project, company, whatever) get rejected because they were unacceptably white and male, so that the job/grant/contract could go to a DEI candidate instead.

Heck, I was on an interview committee where the recruiters and hiring manager openly admitted they weren't interviewing male candidates, and we spent 3 months interviewing 100% of female candidates who applied while hundreds of male applicants got ghosted. That one was more explicit than most, but the same phenomenon has been happening for years at every layer of academia, business and government.

The post your are talking about is specifically about NSF proposals. Your experience with interviewing, project choice, contracting or whatever you are referring to is a different thing. It's not so wild to imagine that a different thing has different practices.

I think you’re talking about something different.

Regardless of which ethnic group, sexual orientation, nationality, etc. I belong to, if I want to get an NSF grant, I have to fill out certain paperwork. And, apparently, it’s expected that I would write how my proposal will make the world a better place based on how it impacts DEI factors. The comment is that it doesn’t actually matter what I say there, since everybody says the same thing. There’s never a case where the NSF isn’t sure about whether to grant funds, and then decides that the way one project impacts DEI makes it better than another project.

I've never found this argument of the anti-DEI crowd to be very convincing, because it inherently implies that without DEI measures, such decisions would be entirely meritocratic.

I think the argument is that while there was suspicion and implicit lack of meritocratic procedures before the initiatives, after doubt was removed.

For example, I just started in the 90s and worked in tech but I never heard an HR person or hiring manager say “we’re only going to interview applicants of a majority race” but after initiatives, it became common to hear this toward an underrepresented race or gender.

I want a diverse workforce. But explicitly discriminating to attempt to fix the problem is a bad way that makes people angry. I think it’s better to work on systemic fixes (more graduates, more training programs, etc).

You're making a case against racism happening in the 90s, but you also think that if racism was happening in the nineties then the people doing it would have announced in public "FYI everyone I'm doing the racism now" which makes you seem somewhat detached from reality.

That’s not what I’m saying. Racism happened in the 90s, but it wasn’t explicit discrimination. Explicitly discriminating against certain races now is something new.

Two things can be bad at the same time: implicit racism then and now; explicit racism just now.

> But explicitly discriminating to attempt to fix the problem is a bad way that makes people angry.

It's also illegal under the Civil Rights Act.

I think so too. It surprised me how people could do things like this and not be sued under the CRA.

> after doubt was removed.

This really isn't quite the universal experience many in this crowd seem to make it out to be.

Perhaps it would help if you considered concepts like "more and less".

Without DEI measures (as implemented by many American institutions in recent years) such decisions would be more meritocratic.

There's still nepotism and rich parents and connections and luck and a whole bunch of random biases by the people making decisions. The point is that while in theory DEI was supposed to be a counter to those forces, in practice it has just become another source of unfairness and injustice.

> There's still nepotism and rich parents and connections and luck and a whole bunch of random biases by the people making decisions. The point is that while in theory DEI was supposed to be a counter to those forces, in practice it has just become another source of unfairness and injustice.

And it tends to lead to a specific result: A number of slots are assigned for each group but then the set of people with rich parents are disproportionately from one group, so nepotism fills all of that group's slots. Then you get a 0% reduction in nepotism and instead the people without rich parents, but from the same demographic group, are the ones excluded. Which quite justifiably makes them mad.

This doesn't follow.

Are you certain that "DEI programs" (which themselves are a wide range of things, from explicit preferences to hire veterans in US Government jobs to as described ineffective NSF rigamarole) are causing overall less meritocracy, or is it just a particularly visible form, some less qualified black people are getting in instead of equally unqualified white people, and that's notable, while the well qualified folks who get in but wouldn't be considered otherwise aren't noticed because they don't make the news.

I'm not sure about th NSF, but at 3 of the 4 companies I worked at DEI initiatives were explicitly discriminatory. One prohibited white and Asian men from a segment of our headcount. Another set specific percentage quotas for women in OKRs (and those quotas were well above women's industry representation). And another prohibited offers being made until a certain number of women and URM were interviewed for a given role.

Not every form of discrimination involves lowering hiring standards. For instance, imagine I flip a coin whenever a Catholic candidate applies. Tails, their resume goes into the garbage bin, heads and their application process as normal. Does this lower lower hiring standards for non Catholics? No. Does this advantage non-Catholics over Catholic candidates? Yes. It would halve the hiring rate of Catholics, though it doesn't result in any "lowering the bar".

I'm not accusing you personally of doing this, but equating discrimination with lowered standards is a common tactic to try and stigmatize the acknowledgement of discriminatory DEI practices.

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