Words flagged in search of current NSF awards
mastodon.social
mastodon.social
- Minimum "Biased" data
- "Discrimination" or "Discriminatory" variables
- Phase space "excluded"
- "Inclusion" of data/variable/anything
- "inequality" -> wow bell's inequality and all this theory work about inequalities will be triggered
These are just example that came into my mind from quick thought and skimming. I'm pretty sure that this will have much worst false positive rate. I would really be surprised if the vast majority if not all of projects get flagged. I'm also sure that 100% of statistics work or project heavily reliant on statistics (probably everything else too) will be flagged.
PS: I'm against any word bans with a very few extreme exceptions. Blanket bans for whatever random person deems offensive inevitably led to this^. Like clockwork, every single time.
You also have to introduce rules for hiring – unless you want your interventions to have an 80-year delay on them. (Or we could make unqualified 18-year-olds responsible for hiring decisions, I suppose.) If you're training children up for careers they're going to be kept out of, you're doing everyone a disservice.
Also in practice these quotas are often put at the lower rank jobs, where there is little discrimination anyway. E.g. IT industry will eat up any good candidate, usually. The problem with quotas is that we can't implement them where they are really needed - in the higher castes of social hierarchy. There are no quotas for CEOs or Senators, or top politicians etc. And really won't be.
So considering that, I tend to think that quotas is a losing game, and only education is the solution. And I mean real efforts there, not some token programs for 30 girls per nation or something. And yeah, unfortunately we will need to wait a lot.
However, my experience of DEI specialists is overwhelmingly positive, even those in the US. Maybe I've got lucky, and have only interacted with competent ones: who knows? But if they say a system involving quotas is the best solution currently-feasible – which iirc I have been told – then that won't convince me that quotas are good, but it will convince me that the other options are worse.
> The problem with quotas is that we can't implement them where they are really needed - in the higher castes of social hierarchy.
This isn't a problem with quotas. It being a problem presupposes that quotas work, surely?
Renaming master to main, doesn’t mean that you can’t do trunk based development, it just means you’re using a different term.
The real problem is that and other such minor episodes normalized word bans as a general principle. So as soon as more radical people come in power, they have used it to ban what THEY want.
Just like normalizing talks about occupation of Greenland today, will inevitably lead to the real occupation in 20-30 years in the future, by some Mango v2.0.
There are some minor advantages of "main", but many of the previous objections to the change are invalid and based on ignorance of the working of git; once I figured out how it works, I do not have an objection, since you can call the branches whatever you want to do anyways, and the names "master" is not something special anyways except for what it is called if you do not otherwise specify a name. Furthermore, existing repositories on GitHub are not automatically changed, and they added function for renaming branches (which can be useful for other reasons too), so for these reasons I think what they did is good.
Some minor benefits of "main" is that it is shorter than "master" and starts with the same two letters as "master" (which might sometimes matter, e.g. if the branch names are listed in alphabetical order and you want to find them in the list). These benefits seems like only minor benefits to me, though.
However, my opinion about the change in SQLite, changing a table name from SQLITE_MASTER to SQLITE_SCHEMA, is different. I think that the new name better describes what it is for (it is the table for the schema of the database), but I would not have made that change, since it can cause problems. They did consider some of them (such as authorizer callbacks, which is something that I had thought of too before I knew what they did about it), and work around them, but that just makes it more messy, so I still think it was a bad idea, but now it is done and it would not be good to undo this change, either. If I was in charge of it I would have deferred the change until SQLite4, rather than changing SQLite3. (There is also the issue of the SQLITE_SCHEMA error code.)
[1] https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-news-cdc-orde...
And as a I said below, even if call it not a ban but idk "popular advisory", the point is that it set a precedent. And now right wingers would really ban words they don't like.
Also they may argue that they did not ban their words either. Can you apply for grant elsewhere? Yes you can, technically. "So what the problem"(c) they will ask.
Different wrongness do get compare. That doesn't make very very very wrong to be equivalent to just very wrong. Both are however wrong. The kind of censorship and self-censorship we have seen in science, popular media and even humor in the last few decades has been insane compared to the decades previous. To throw in a random example, someone who criticized religion was murdered a few days ago in Sweden, and as a society we kind just expected it and waiting for it to happen. Something like Monty Python could not exist today as they would had either been censored or murdered, and so they would have been forced to self-censor long before their skills as comedians would have grown.
Censorship is not something we can pick and choose from.
Obviously yes. Censorship is not something we can pick and choose from.
> and there's no need to bring up lesser wrongs to distract us from that.
There would not be a need for that if people agreed that censorship is wrong. As long people see some censorship as good, rather than a lesser wrongs, the trend of ever more censorship will just continue and this kind of events will continue to occur and at larger scope. Censorship is a kind of political violence that once accepted only expands until the social rules totally breaks apart. It can't exit as just a rule for the government, it must be something that people inherently support as a concept.
Nobody was forced to stop using master/slave, some companies just chose not to because that was their preference. They didn't want to use the word slave anymore. It's reasonable to call it pointless or performative, but I don't think any of the decision-makers at these companies were forced into it. Most companies did not change anything, and they faced absolutely no consequences.
I'm sure there were some (for example) GitHub employees who didn't agree with the decision and maybe felt censored, but basically every company on the planet has standards for language in the workplace, so in that sense every company is guilty of censorship. GitHub did not force any of its users to do anything, you could still use whatever language you want, and you can search "slave" right now to see how common it still is.
Let's not mix up issues though.
Removing 'master' in git has much less justification than removing master/slave terminology.
https://www.theserverside.com/feature/Why-GitHub-renamed-its...
They did stuff. Plenty qualifies as "removing". (And I didn't say they reached out and changed the entire world.)
And unlike master/slave, it's fake inclusivity.
Which is different from saying they "removed", because "removed" sounds like 100% removal. They didn't 100% remove, but that's not my argument, only a strawman of it.
So will you meet me at what I actually meant, or are you going to insist on your own wording that doesn't actually rebut me?
Hell, I didn't even say they accomplished their goal. I just criticized the goal, not just for github but for everyone else doing the same thing. And the goal is about git repos. Lots of those are on github, and lots of those are influenced by the things github did.
TL;DR: Lots of people removed "master" from git repos.
So because a lot of people chose to no longer use "master" in their git repos, it justifies an authoritarian rollback of science and health? No one cares what their git branches are called. Get that stupid chip off your shoulder and smell the fire. The country is burning.
(I sure hope you're not just complaining that I'm wasting words on it while more important things are happening in the world, because that's pure hypocrisy and applies to 99-100% of comments on this site. "Never do anything unimportant" is a terrible motto. So is "never complain about anything minor".)
Even for new projects, if you create a empty repository on GitHub and then send a repository from your own computer, it will work with whatever branch name you give it, at least in my experience (I had sent repositories with the only branch named "trunk" and it seems to cause no problems at all as far as I can tell).
Neither git nor GitHub software cares what the branches are called as far as I know; I think they just changed the default settings if you are creating a repository using GitHub, but you are not required to use them.
And, actually, I read the documentation and you can even make per-user settings on GitHub, and you can change the default branch name for git itself too (and, like in GitHub, this setting can also be changed in git).
They also added the function to rename branches (you can rename any branch, not only the default branch), and they provide documentation about how this is working, so this is a side benefit of their work on this, in case it is sometimes useful to rename branches (although I think probably it is usually better not to rename existing branches, maybe sometimes it might be useful).
Furthermore, "main" is shorter than "master", and starts with the same two letters; but in my opinion, these are minor benefits (although they are still beneficial anyways).
However, even though I think this is good, this does not imply that all software that used "master" and changed it, were doing good. In many cases they weren't good, but git (and GitHub) isn't one of them that isn't good. The reasons why it is good or not good have to do with the existing working of the software and of working of names, and how the changes are being handled, and is not because of racism and stuff like that.
I work at the biggest tech company, which employs hundreds of thousands of people and these rules are applied across all codebases.
This stuff is widespread across big companies and the government.
There are posters here acting as if there is a singular entity in charge of IT, that forces this rule on everyone.
I don't see what consequence it is that your particular organization prefers to do things its own way. It's a completely different proposition from pretending like the word is banned outright for everyone, by someone.
And other problems that do not exist.
We’re still not allowed to use “whitelist” and “blacklist” because it’s somehow racism.
We have linters which bar us from checking in code with these words and a bot which scolds us publicly in chats.
Now the same people who applauded that policing of speech suddenly are offended when their explicit political speech is being removed.
It’s just simply hypocrisy.
I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy, the people complaining the loudest are the same people who exuberantly censor people they disagree with.
These type of people have lost moral authority.
that is quite disturbing to me
People who do this obviously get joy out of bossing other people around and pretending they are being virtuous.
But you do you.
This happens as you age. The world and customs you grew up with, despite how they may feel too you, are not the natural state of the world.
Accept that new customs may replace them.
Very few actually want to apply it equally to both their side and the opposing side.
I did notice this one group called FIRE that actually does a pretty decent job of applying free speech rights relatively equally, I think we should support it more:
Molly White posted something yesterday: “you have a lot more in common with the ‘other people’ than you have with the people in power.” https://fosstodon.org/@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io/1139421522542...
Party of free speech that wants to protect women according to their supporters.
thats not the america i want to live in, but it does appear to be the one we are currently in.
One of the USA's main power sources is controlling the world reserve currency. This means that every other country imports inflation from the USA, in exchange for delivering vast quantities of useful goods and services to the USA. Without this special status, the USA will have to export as much as it imports.
"Controlling the world reserve currency" and "Having a massive trade deficit" are the same word, since trade deficit is how much stuff other countries sent you without you having to send stuff to them, which is how much currency you sent to those countries. Trump says he wants to eliminate the trade deficit.
(report from October 9, 2024 released by Ted Cruz)
https://www.science.org/content/article/amid-uncertainty-her...
(Science article from November 6 which briefly discusses the Cruz report)
It's been clear from the beginning that getting rid of equity and inclusion included disabled people; does nobody remember when Trump made fun of the disabled reporter in his first term? He hates them.
I was shown this back in college when I raised concerns about how cancel culture was stifling the free exchange of ideas and when I argued against the idea that speech was the same thing as violence. I guess if this is the world we live in the same thing applies in the other direction.
“The first amendment doesn’t shield you from criticism or consequences”
“It’s just that people listening think you’re an asshole”
“And they’re showing you the door”
MAGA is a death cult.
That said, this specific post is over-egging the post it's quoting.
The original post is https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:aixj65vnqpllcjnc4ante42b/po... by Darby Saxbe at USC, leaking materials from an NSF Program Officer. She says these are words that "can cause a grant to be pulled". What she's leaking appears to be inference done, over a partial set of "flagged" awards, and the keywords drawn from them. It does not say this is the official list of keywords.
The accompanying decision tree - what the NSF is being ordered to do - says if the "keywords and context" of various parts of the grant application "implicate" Trump's executive orders (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14151), then they must keep the flag and mark that they found "DEIA and other EO language" -- but if not, they can remove the flag. So if you proposed "Systemic analysis of the bigliest cofeve all women find irresistible", you'd likely get funded, because the context reveals you're a big Trump suck-up, even if you used words like "systemic" and "women".
What I get from the original post is the word "systemic" is not actually banned, and may not even be a "keyword" causing awards to be "flagged". But if you're dependent on a grant from NSF for your livelyhood, you obviously want the greatest chances of being funded, and simply not knowing what the orange one is going to fuck about with next, or what exactly he's instructed people to do, is a great cause of anxiety. That's information asymmetry, and it's a form of power in itself. And he's already fucked about by stopping all funding immediately and only adding it back after review. But don't let posts that are also unofficial add to your anxiety.
Surely HN users wouldn’t be so quick to just believe a random mastadon post because it aligns with their own <flagged words>, right?
[Edit] A few seconds later, I cannot find it no matter how many times I click "more".
People are getting into upvote/downvote wars over comments on the post. When that happens, the HN algorithm automatically downranks the post as likely to drive bad behavior among users.
The first amendment is specifically about preventing government reprisals for speech. If I would have won a federal grant, but was denied it because I said "trans rights," that's the definition of a first amendment violation.
If a scientist currently or previously spammed papers of the form "why Nazis were right all along", we should all hope the government doesn't fund that subject or person.
The mass retraction of previously published papers is ethically concerning, but choice of who/what to fund in future is always completely in-scope for leadership to choose, regardless of whether you agree with the particular decision.
You can't oppose chaos while giving up on rigor yourself.