"Homotopical macrocosms for higher category theory" identified as woke DEI grant | Hacker News Reader

"Homotopical macrocosms for higher category theory" identified as woke DEI grant

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108 pointsnabla9146 comments

At the moment it's simply weird discriminatory cutting of grants by internet trolls, but it's quite likely that all Federal research funding will vanish at the next budget. Leaving that to China to catch up.

The firehose of money won't go away, but you can bet dollars to donuts that it will be redirected right towards a spoils system, where the administration's friends and supporters will be reaping the rewards of victory.

And it won't even be coy about it.

But, but, but..... he had an election promise to "drain the swamp" and get rid of such corruption!

It's going to be completely Russian-style oligarchy.

The "American oligarchs" is already a term we use here.

Let the Russians have the term oligarchs, we have robber barons and tycoons.

Nothing new under the sun.

I was expecting someone to chime in with this.

It is new in living memory. The scale and sheer audacity of it is staggering.

Prior to this year, you could say with a straight face that the US is mostly a low-corruption, rule of law sort of country. Even the veneer of that has been thrown completely out the window, in favor of rule-by-law. This government is petty, vindictive, and is openly peddling access to groups that are passing loyalty and purity tests.

Meanwhile, all the watchmen have been fired, and replaced with party loyalists.

I present Exhibit A: The shitshow around the cessation of the prosecution of Eric Adams. It's literal quid-pro-quo political horse trading, where he'll be shilling for Trump, in exchange for not going to prison.

I also present Exhibit B: Every tech firm literally tripping over itself to virtue signal and comply with whatever nonsense is coming out of the White House. Showing up in person to kiss the ring helps too, see, in particular - TikTok magically getting a stay of execution, in exchange for some secret, undisclosed backroom deal.

If your boss at work behaved this way to you, anyone here would be livid.

I think it happening in the US is the new bit, but the WOT produced the insane scenes of flying in twelve billion dollars of loose notes and it (of course) vanishing: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

If Kennedy has his way, will we still have donuts?

Sadly unsurprising, given the witch-hunt nature of recent cuts – Emily Riehl's been a big source of mentorship and inspiration for women in mathematics, and she's been pretty vocal about it. The point is to make a show of stamping out "DEI" for a headline, and to hope that no one looks too closely at the details.

"first they came for" has become "first they fired".

The utter indifference is very distressing.

I think it is true that a subset of HN readers don't want to see stories about politics. This subset may intersect with another subset that is happy to see the things described in these stories happen.

What I'm going to call the "anti woke mind virus" has captured a lot of people: they're happy to burn down anything because they're annoyed about "woke", often based on a single misrepresented incident.

Part of it is many technically inclined people may have trust, respect and admiration for other technically inclined people, especially those who are famous and appear to be successful from an entrepreneurial perspective. When some of these famous people start expressing extreme political views and "awkward" hand gestures, it moves the Overton window to a point that these previously objectionable perspectives now appear to be reasonable. It wouldn't be a stretch for them to then express concern and react passionately when they see others criticize their "heroes".

> technically inclined people may have trust, respect and admiration for other technically inclined people, especially those who are famous and appear to be successful from an entrepreneurial perspective.

You appear to be writing those words entirely from an American (specifically a Silicon Valley) mindset, which is hardly surprising on this forum.

I can assure you, there is no such unconditional love expressed for such people on this side of the pond. Indeed, the fawning of some Americans over the likes of Musk is rather baffling.

> I think it is true that a subset of HN readers don't want to see stories about politics.

There is a huge subset of HN readers who don't live in the USA, and thus don't really care about political drama in the USA as long as it is not relevant for their own life.

Trump's approval numbers do not suggest indifference, but more likely self censorship. I think most people were overwhelmingly opposed to all of this DEI stuff, but that can be disingenuously framed as saying somebody is opposed to e.g. diversity or inclusion, as opposed to them being opposed to what DEI amounts to - which is about pursuing equality of outcome, something that is in direct conflict with everything that the Social Rights Movement fought for and achieved.

I think there's also the argument that the government should not be pushing social ideology, period. Certainly not the federal government. In particular if they were just replacing the DEI funding with e.g. Jesus funding, I would be vehemently opposed to this all. But so long as they continue to just cut the funding without replacement, I'm instead vehemently supportive of it.

Self-censorship about their opinions on cutting grants that mention forbidden keywords, even if the grant outcomes have nothing to do with said keywords?

No, what you have in this thread is a typical social media misinformation circle jerk. One can download the database of selected grants and many titles have absolutely nothing to do with DEI. They're cancelling it based upon the content of the proposals. DEI adherence used to factor into proposals and it no longer does. I expect this is leading to three categories of proposals all being cancelled:

1) Proposals which were inherently about DEI stuff.

2) Proposals unrelated to DEI stuff but which were only pushed into the greenlit zone due DEI components within the proposal.

3) Proposals unrelated to DEI stuff but whose funding was increased substantially to fulfill a DEI component of the proposal.

No. This isn't about grant dollars actually being rescinded while the research is in process – you can't do that.

It's about a senator attempting to lead his own "investigation" into grants awarded during the Biden administration, and using shoddy methodology to do so.

This shouldn't be conflated, either, with how the NSF and NIH have currently flagging grant proposals in review for immediate rejection.

Thanks, you're completely correct that these funds already been dispersed (in many cases years ago). I didn't notice that at all.

That said, I would add some context to your complaint about Cruz. I have nothing positive to say about that man, perhaps beyond him being quite good at seeing which way the winds are blowing, but he is the head of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation [1] whose jurisdiction explicitly includes "Science, engineering, and technology research and development and policy." So there is probably no more appropriate individual to be spearheading such investigations, for better or for worse.

And yeah their methodology was described here [2] on page 38. I agree it's far from stellar, but I'd argue that it seems like the system for distributing the grants was the underlying flaw. So far as I can tell it seems like they didn't have any sort of point system, so I have no clue how they were trying to be remotely impartial or consistent (let alone accountable) with who and which proposals were funded. If proposals were being funded or rejected as whimsically as that report would suggest, then it's probably inevitable that efforts to find bad apples would end up just as blunt.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Committee...

[2] - https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092...

Look at other oligarchies the trend to be „not interested in politics“ usually sky rockets.

> I think there's also the argument that the government should not be pushing social ideology, period.

And Category Theory is social ideology?

What would you have us do? People voted for this. I’ve hated every minute of this, but they obviously have the authority here. Apart from legal challenges, this very much seems like a “we voted to make our country nontrivially worse off in the long run” scenario.

There’s an unbelievable opportunity for other countries to pick up world class U.S researchers.

The next four years all countries need to do is offer the research funding and citizenship and university positions and entirely new industries and centers of knowledge could be created.

Would it be possible for the U.S. to clamp down on emigration too? Maybe threaten high tariffs against countries that take in U.S. citizens.

That would be truly exceptional, but: the US already is the only country that makes its citizens pay taxes when they're not resident at all. (Lots will make you pay taxes if you're partially resident)

They could quite easily take out anti-dual-taxation agreements and try to make US overseas nationals pay two sets of tax.

The existing regulations giving the US global jurisdiction over KYC/AML for Americans can also make it hard for Americans to get bank accounts overseas; that could easily be escalated.

Why would they want to?

Does "they" mean the concerned citizens or the U.S. administration?

The administration would likely want to prevent talent from escaping to a more enlightened country.

Talented citizens may want to emigrate if they believe that they will be persecuted because of their skin colour or gender etc.

I can only dream of the EU snatching top talent from the US and kick starting a competetive European tech sector. Cloud computing, AI etc. Now would be a great time to take the initiative.

You romanticize the EU. There are insurmountable problems specially in the "old" EU members.

Chief being that the EU is not a nation state.

Nations within the EU have their own interests that conflict

That's part of the dream. Member states getting their shit together and push for mutual progress. This would of course fuel the nationalist opposition and cause it to crash, but one can always dream.

> I can only dream of the EU snatching top talent from the US

This top talent will not be satisfied with the common salaries in many EU countries. Also, it will be unsatisfied that Ireland and Malta are the only EU countries where English is an official language, and in none of them English is the only official language.

Unsurprising.

I downloaded the linked excel file and this is the description of the first project link I clicked on:

> "COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: CISE-MSI: DP: CPS: CYBER RESILIENT 5G ENABLED VIRTUAL POWER SYSTEM FOR GROWING POWER DEMAND"

I feel like they just go by keywords like covid, 5g, gender, women, climate change etc....

Wait, they put 5G on the banned list? Are they going to scrap the fifth-gen fighter aircraft too?

It's depressing that they didn't even bother to read the actual grant they were targeting.

Very generous of you to assume they have the mental ability to do that.

It's not based on titles. Here [1] is the proposal. It included "Furthermore, by employing and mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM, this project will aim at bridging the gap in institutions across the US. It will train the next generation of scholars from minority serving universities and marginalized communities in the fields of cybersecurity, utilization of renewable resources, and machine learning to address the pressing problems of this age."

Previously DEI adherence weighed into which proposals were awarded funding. They no longer do. It's unclear exactly how this is working but suspect they're flagging grants where either the entire point was DEI, or where the project was unrelated to DEI but the DEI stuff pushed it into the acceptable range (and/or drove the grant amount higher than necessary for the underlying science), and cancelling them.

[1] - https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2219701&His...

Interesting, thank you for the addendum! Do you believe it is likely that inclusions of things such as "by employing and mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM, this project will aim at bridging the gap in institutions across the US" result in a higher likeliness of funding? I also wonder if Hacker News would generally consider it to be ethical to use this to increase the likeliness of funding. In this case it does seem unrelated to DEI otherwise.

Definitely. The previous administration used executive power to direct various government organizations to factor DEI into all government funding, and this is also reflected in the last line of the proposal's abstract (extremely odd place for an administrative comment but that's where it is): "This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria."

If there is a point scheme being used behind the scenes, as seems reasonably probable, then selecting all grants to be eliminated was probably not much more than a single SQL query.

> The previous administration used executive power to direct various government organizations to factor DEI into all government funding,

Not the NSF. Provisions in NSF's organic statute to create programs that "expand STEM opportunities" were introduced by the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, and were retained through the CHIPS Act.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1862s-5

> If there is a point scheme being used behind the scenes, as seems reasonably probable, then selecting all grants to be eliminated was probably not much more than a single SQL query.

No. The NSF review process does not use numeric ratings. Panels of peer reviewers get a tranche of proposals, provide comments individually, and then collectively sort them into competitiveness categories. There is no "DEI score" or "DEI component".

https://www.researchdevelopment.socsci.uci.edu/files/documen...

https://sociobiology.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/exactly-how-an...

The NSF falls under Federal executive authority which is exactly why Trump is able to do what he's doing. Biden did the equal but opposite thing with his very first executive order. It effectively required all branches of the Federal government to institute DEI policies and policies aimed at furthering DEI ends. [1] In fact his executive order specifically worked to undo a previous Trump executive order [2] which forbade Federal agencies from discriminating against/for individuals/groups based on their race or sex.

To put a number to this, by the metric this report (from this topic) was using to measure DEI funding, 0.29% of NSF grants were for DEI stuff in 2021. By 2024, it was up to 27%! [3] Apologies for the excess citations here, but I think it's important on such a charged topic.

[1] - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/25/2021-01...

[2] - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/09/28/2020-21...

[3] - https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092... (page 2)

Then Trump's meddling with the NSF is executive authority without oversight – he cannot undo Biden-era legislative acts, which affect the NSF regardless of what Biden ordered elsewhere. Trump does not have complete authority over what Federal agencies do, despite legislation, as a matter of constitutional law – or, rather, JD Vance would like to argue that's the case within the doctrine of unitary executive theory, as well as the Heritage Foundation... we shall see, and the barrage of executive orders here is likely to give us a test case in the Supreme Court

And, of course, we've argued elsewhere that the report's methdology and results are... not a good assumption to begin this conversation on.

DEI stuff will never hold up under legal scrutiny - it runs face first into the Equal Protection Clause in the Constitution, and orders will also contradict the Civil Rights Act. Again, this is how race based admissions in universities were deemed unlawful.

The legislation you previously linked is solely mentioning a series of grants specifically aimed at increasing diversity, with specially allocated funding totaling $23 million. That's not only going to be separate from the NSF budget, but would be ~0.25% of their budget if not. It's unclear of such things would hold up under the Equal Protection Clause, but it's largely irrelevant one way or the other.

A practical but immeasurable issue is the scale of impact. Encouraging diversity is good, impactful and systematic discrimination is not. There's a not entirely well defined line between the two, but I think a program at this scale would have few claim it's the latter.

https://old.reddit.com/r/PhD/comments/1ihzjsn/keywords_that_...

The way it’s being done is profoundly unserious, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is politicians interfering with what it’s acceptable to think and study.

https://mastodon.social/@knutson_brain@sfba.social/114000564...

> NSF actually required investigators to highlight outreach to diverse audiences in their grant applications. ( #catch22 )

So it used to be that you had stretch to include whatever little bits of DEI-connection you had in your grant applications (what's the DEI-equivalent of greenwashing?), and now the tables have turned and they're being punished for it. So much waste.

> So it used to be that you had stretch to include whatever little bits of DEI-connection you had in your grant applications (what's the DEI-equivalent of greenwashing?), and now the tables have turned and they're being punished for it.

Lesson learned: as a founding agency, you should never create incentives to introduce politics into research proposals. Instead, you should incentivize to keep politics out of them as much as possible. Otherwise, as you can see here, drama starts to kindle as soon as the prevailing political "wind direction" changes.

But what is political now? Isn't climate science a political issue in the US.

Since I don't live in the USA, I don't have a feeling for the current political climate [pun intended] there, so take the following remark with a grain of salt.

But if I go by my gut feeling, I'd say that there is a difference between wanting to understand by what and how much the climate is influenced by various factors (as unpolitical as possible in this academic discipline) vs having a political stance which policy measures to take based on these insights (e.g.

- do nothing and tolerate the possible risks

- lobby for strongly reducing CO2 emissions

- lobby for doing geoengineering to stop the climate change

). My feeling is that at least some climate scientists want to be both researchers and "politicians" for their academic discipline.

No Homo... No Morphisms .., No One to Many, and absolutely No Injections.

Why has this post been flagged? Category theory is extremely relevant to programming and this post has plenty of points and comments. Any thoughts dang?

Homomorphic encryption up next.

> Homomorphic encryption up next.

This might actually be a welcome side effect for those in power:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

Sounds like an AI could kinda mangle that title into some sort of critical homo theory and bang your government funding is gone.

Research doesn’t seem like something that will be valued much into the future.

To me it sounds like Elon entered „homo“ into the list of forbidden keywords and went off to other tasks. Hanlon‘s Razor and all that.

They're going to outlaw Lisp because it's homoiconic, is associated with the greek letter lambda, and talks with a queer accent.

This reminds me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik

These people have concept of meritocracy like "free speech absolutists" about free speech: just vibes.

> IN PARALLEL, THE PI HAS CONCRETE PLANS TO CONTINUE HER EXPOSITORY AND OUTREACH WORK WHICH INCLUDE A NEW BOOK (ELEMENTS OF INFINITY-CATEGORY THEORY, JOINT WITH VERITY), LECTURES DIRECTED AT THE GENERAL PUBLIC, SURVEY ARTICLES PREPARED FOR A VARIETY OF AUDIENCES, AND EFFORTS TO IMPROVE ACCESS TO ADVANCED MATHEMATICS, SUCH AS HER SERVICE ON THE EQUITY, DIVERSITY, AND INCLUSION ADVISORY BOARD AT THE BANFF INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH STATION.

Guilty by association.

The stunt is to censor these words, since even irrelevant mention of them will trigger a dumb filter.

It doesn't matter if the research is on the topic of DEI; if those words are mentioned, it's a slippery slope into wokedom, which is VERBOTEN.

This is an invitation to saturate the field with those words.

And to seek convoluted ways to describe actual work around words the trolls understand.

The fact that the title starts with "homo" probably doesn't help in the newly established Land of the Obtuse Bigots™.

Why didn’t she put something about working at a soup kitchen into her grant proposal? I guess because working at a soup kitchen doesn’t in any way qualify her for a grant. But she did put information about “services” at a DEI board, probably because that information can help get her a grant.

What would you think if most approved grants started with “I am a rich white man”? Surely that wouldn’t be the exact reason why the grant was given. But why would that even be in a grant proposal? What if many approved grants contained “I preside over a board of Aryan math”? Would that be totally fine and not slippery?

Ah, the mathematical field of false equivalence classes.

That’s called a comparison, an intuition pump, an invitation to entertain an opposite view. The parent comment said it was an “irrelevant mention”. I simply tried to articulate why it cannot be considered so.

Do you actually agree that DEI mention is immaterial to the grant proposal? If so, it can be easily removed, but some people, like the other person who replied to me, seem to think it’s actually a good thing and it’s not immaterial and grants should be distributed based on such criteria.

It’s the same old trite progression of “it doesn’t exist” -> “it doesn’t matter” -> “it’s actually a good thing”. Every. Single. Time.

Of course this helps her proposal, but not because the mere mention of DEI gets it a rubber stamp.

It’s part of her credentials to show that she’s taken an active role in expanding access to these advanced fields. It shows she’s part of the community and cares about the field she’s in.

Working in a soup kitchen and being a rich white man as counter examples don’t work to prove your point because duh they aren’t related to math.

> Of course this helps her proposal, but not because the mere mention of DEI gets it a rubber stamp.

Of course.

> It’s part of her credentials to show that she’s taken an active role in expanding access to these advanced fields. It shows she’s part of the community and cares about the field she’s in.

No, it is not. That is not related to category theory in any way. That’s really stretching any notion of “credential”. It seems really bad to distribute grants according to such qualifications. Community organising and politics aren’t math.

> Working in a soup kitchen and being a rich white man as counter examples don’t work to prove your point because duh they aren’t related to math.

A soup kitchen for poor math enthusiasts? A head of Arian math society? Very math related.

> A soup kitchen for poor math enthusiasts?

Far more lilely to encounter a Settlers of Catan ramen party for breadline math enthusiasts.

Honest to god, if a soup kitchen for poor math enthusiasts was a thing then it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to mention your involvement in your grant application.

That’s networking, that’s community, it couldn’t hurt to mention it.

Now the explicitly racist “Aryan Math Society”? Id leave that off the proposal.

Well, I guess there is simply fundamental disagreement. Some people dislike arbitrary discrimination. And others think that encouraging it is “networking” and discouraging it is literally Nazism.

So our disagreement is that you think DEI and soup kitchens are arbitrary discrimination?

Yeah, providing math grants based on community outreach is arbitrary discrimination.

1) in what way? 2) that’s not their only credential.

> being a rich white man [...] don’t work to prove your point because duh they aren’t related to math.

Historically, being a rich white man is related to math:

  - elite European men historically had better access to education
  - many famous mathematicians came from wealthy backgrounds
  - historical math societies were almost entirely composed of rich white men
  - math advanced in navigation, trade and military which were historically occupied by men
  - when circumstance didn't, rich white men historically excluded women and colored people

The "database" released by Ted Cruz is particularly egregious about it – you can toss a dart at any row, read the reward description, and bet on whether the topic is actually "DEI".

My favorite one is Award #2303483: "COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: USING A COMBINED BASIN ANALYSIS, ISOTOPIC, AND MODELING APPROACH TO RECONSTRUCT THE LGM THROUGH EARLY HOLOCENE HYDROCLIMATE FOR GLACIAL LAKE MOJAVE."

My second favourite is Award #2227091 "CAREER: VERSATILE WEARABLE ROBOTS FOR REHABILITATION OF CHILDREN WITH GAIT DISABILITIES". Think of the children!

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/index.cfm? a=files.serve&File_id=94060590-F32F-4944-8810-300E6766B1D6

"She probably got in trouble for the following passage:

.. HER SERVICE ON THE EQUITY, DIVERSITY, AND INCLUSION ADVISORY BOARD.."

Are you sure it wasn't just for having 'homo-' in the title, that would be too funny .. if it wasn't a travesty.

It is either an ad hominem attack, and the attackers probably did not even care that the grant is about maths. Or a simplistic filter in Excel was used to determine 'woke', and there is 'homo' in the title of the project.

It is clear that people flagging these posts have a ulterior agenda. While the other posts have plausible deniability cover for being "political", this is as relevant to hacker news as anything.

I believe that Dang does make an attempt to unflag some of these kinds of topics, but there's also the issue that the discussions can become highly politicised too which is not the stated purpose of HN.

Indeed, higher category theory is a veritable minefield of political rabbit holes.

And who could possibly trust HN denizens, those notoriously toxic and tech-ignorant people, to sensibly discuss such things as a tech oligarch delivering Nazi salutes at an inauguration [0, 1]. Or the same man (wealthiest known on Earth) being given physical access to the US treasury [2]. Or warnings from five former treasury secretaries in the NYT about the danger this poses to Democracy [3], the EFF bringing lawsuits over this (unflagged after many hours)[4], or the ability to even discuss all the false flags which we have been riddled with for the last month [5, 6].

This last month has been a real eye opener. Even Paul Graham and Garry Tan have been cheerleading for DOGE, and it's fucking disturbing that we're not allowed to discuss it on any active thread.

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42772995

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42773778

2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42929121

3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43009174

4 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43020091

5 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42900560

6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42781604

> it's fucking disturbing that we're not allowed to discuss it on any active thread

This is the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" theory of HN threads. You're talking about the most-discussed topic on HN, by far, of the past several weeks.

If you, or anyone, want to know what's happening with these threads and flags, how we moderate this, and what the principles are, there are a bunch of links here which should answer all your questions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43050893. If you familiarize yourself with that material and still have a question that I haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

Btw, you can't evaluate this with a random sample of links on a MOT (Major Ongoing Topic). You need to look at the threads that have had significant frontpage time and discussion. Obviously there have been many more submissions than that—that is the case with any MOT. If most of these didn't get flagged and/or downweighted, then HN's frontpage would consist of little else.

I realize that some users feel so passionately right now that they would welcome that, but I don't believe that the bulk of the community wants this (far from it), and in any case we couldn't let HN be completely taken over by any MOT without ruining it for its intended purpose.

Every post I've seen recently talking about all the false flags here has ended up rapidly flagged.

Feel free to prove me wrong, by showing one single post on this topic, at any time over the past couple weeks, which wasn't flagged. Such an obvious way to manipulate discussion here needs to be addressed from time to time; now being one of those times.

The discussion in those threads (ie [6]) shows widespread agreement; far from your assertion of what "the bulk of the community wants".

You can assert that stories about DOGE are not being deliberately and widely suppressed here, or that they are but for a good reason - but I don't believe you. And I don't think you believe yourself either. If you do, you shouldn't.

[6] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42900560

Nobody is saying those threads aren't getting flagged. The issues are who is flagging them, why they're flagging them, and what we should do about it. I've been posting about that a great deal.

If you want a serious answer, I need you to engage with what I've actually said and explained, not some imaginary substitute which you then find hard to believe. If you follow the link in my GP comment, and the links there, you'll find all you need to know and then some. You're welcome to disbelieve any of that, but please at least disbelieve something I actually said.

Sorry for being tetchy—I'm happy to answer any HN user who has a question, but I need you guys to do a bit of work too. There aren't enough hours to always repeat everything from scratch. If there's a question that I haven't already answered many times, I'd like to know what is and I'd be happy to try to answer it. Cross-examinations, though? not so much.

> The issues are who is flagging them, why they're flagging them, and what we should do about it. I've been posting about that a great deal.

Are you saying that this is a discussion we could have as a community, without the thread on it getting flagged? Or are we supposed to just listen to what you have to say and leave things there.

The short answer is that meta submissions are nearly always off topic but there's plenty of discussion going on in the comments.

However, this is the sort of question I was talking about. Had you familiarized yourself with the relevant material, your question would have answered itself. For example, here's a recent subthread with plenty of back-and-forth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993029. No one was "just listening and leaving things there", and I responded 20 times in that thread alone.

I don't expect you (or anyone) to see all of these, but there's a lot of redundancy, so you don't need to see all of them.

> this is the sort of question I was talking about. Had you familiarized yourself with the relevant material, your question would have answered itself.

I wasn't asking what the rules are, but thanks for revealing your condescension.

I was asking if you, Dang, the moderator of this site, would allow such a discussion. And indeed, you answered my question; if indirectly.

So I'm curious, what's the deal with the thread at hand? It looks like the "[flagged]" tag on the post title is now gone, but, as far as I can tell, the post itself still does not show up on the main page at all, so effectively it's still hidden?

It's probably a lot to ask for, but the context for a flag could be helpful. I came across this one since I just posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43059077 which I thought was on-topic (maths are, and we have had plenty of useful conversations on how science is done too), but that post was flagged.

I turned off the flags on it yesterday, but that wasn't enough to make it go back onto the front page. Whether that made it "hidden" depends on what you mean by that word. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN [1] - there are only 30 slots. Does everything not in those 30 count as hidden? I wouldn't say so.

Why did I not restore this particular thread to the front page? The short answer is repetition. There have been many other recent major discussions on this topic—not about this specific detail about a paper on category theory, of course, but that alone is not enough information to constitute a new topic that can support a substantive new conversation. In HN jargon this is called SNI (Significant New Information), and it was lacking here.

Here are two other recent posts that explain this in more depth:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389

That a paper on category theory got caught in the ongoing funding purge is absurd, of course, but it's not a different topic in the sense that there's a substantively new discussion to be had about it, relative to the other recent threads about the funding purge.

Internet discussion has the tendency, as the same divisive topic gets worked over and over, to become more repetitive, more snarky, more shallow. All that is what we're trying to avoid here. It also gets a lot more meta, meaning you get comments about other comments, other users, the site, the community, the process, the mods, etc., rather than about the actual topic. It is a sure sign of a deteriorating discussion when even the people who most want to have the discussion can't find anything new to say.

When the juice has all been squeezed out of the lemon, nothing but rind is left. Making up for a lack of new information with a surplus of indignation is the opposite of what we want on HN.

Threads like this are a variant of the old joke about a group of people who know all the jokes by heart so they can just mention them by number and everybody laughs—except in this case the response is not laughter but anger, the list is not of jokes but outrages, and what gets mentioned is not numbers but catchphrases and talking points.

That showed up in the current thread very clearly, so this is actually a good example for people who want to understand this aspect of how we moderate HN.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> Whether that made it "hidden" depends on what you mean by that word. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN [1] - there are only 30 slots. Does everything not in those 30 count as hidden? I wouldn't say so.

I checked the first 10 or so pages of 30, until reaching the point where all posts were much older, and there were enough of a similar age with fewer points that it seemed unlikely that all of them had been up-weighted.

Edit: Okay, it's rank 738, on page 25.

It spent half an hour on the front page and 90 minutes in the top 10 pages. You can call that 'hidden', but everything falls off the front page(s) after a while, so everything ends up 'hidden' that way.

The more important question is how much time on the front page(s) a story had, and whether it was too much time or too little. I think I've answered that in the GP comment and the other links there, but if not, let me know.

Yup I have emailed dang a few times regarding wrongly flagged submissions and he has always unflagged them.

Tip, use https://news.ycombinator.com/active

Flagged posts show up there (like this one), so tech bros trying to censor all M*sk and D0GE stuff will not be able to completely silence it.

This forum is mostly tech bros.

The vast majority does not think this is off-topic. Even the ones that support Papa Elon and Daddy Trump.

There is a double standard here. Political posts against conservatives have been accepted here for years with little pushback. Anything against liberal causes is immediately flagged. It's time to accept that political posts are political even if it happens to be favorable to your preferred political agenda.

Musk is an Idiot at best and Russian asset at worst. But if I see highly upvoted comment complaining or conspiracy theorizing about flagging, after Dang has been tirelessly and countless times explaining how things work, I flag the thread out of principle.

That's great that you are calling "Describing things as they happened" as conspiracy theories.

Also you like to make it harder for the person you are calling tireless

Let's see, "Homotypical" sounds gay and there's some mention of DEI in the grant. It seems that some AI just flagged this, and the block will eventually be reversed (because it's not actually about anything "woke"). I don't even think a layman would mistake this for a "woke" grant, and I expect it to potentially be reversed. On the other hand, what exactly is the application of this abstruse stuff? Is it worth the investment? Lots of research is actually useless.

I still don't understand the meaning of "woke", for example here is one of the grants that are in Ted Cruz database:

https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_2414922_4900/

> STABLE HOMOTOPY THEORY IN ALGEBRA, TOPOLOGY, AND GEOMETRY -STABLE HOMOTOPY THEORY WAS DEVELOPED [...]

> TO ADDRESS INEQUALITY AT THE K-12 LEVEL, THE PI WILL DEVELOP AND MANAGE A PROGRAM PAIRING UNDERGRADUATES FROM HIS HOME INSTITUTION WITH STUDENTS FROM LOCAL AFTER-SCHOOL PROGRAMS FOR ONLINE TUTORING. THIS PROGRAM WOULD CIRCUMVENT CERTAIN BARRIERS TO PARTICIPATION, SUCH AS LACK OF ACCESS TO TRANSPORTATION AND FACILITIES, WHICH ARE COMMON IN TRADITIONAL OUTREACH

Is this really deemed as "neo-Marxist" "far-left" "nonsense" by Trumpists? Is this the same "wokeness" that Paul Graham was referring to in his latest essay?

The answer is probably unfortunately, "it's whatever you want it to be, just be on my side". Not defining these things is a feature, not a bug.

It could be argued that people who voted for Trump were in the "not college" spectrum[^1], and thus, they would approve of both the anti-woke and anti-science move.

In fact, I would be as bold as saying that most who voted for Trump (a billionaire of dubious conduct, convicted of all sort of crimes) were not billionaires themselves, and thus displayed a certain kind of lack of reasoning and empathy for themselves.

In any case, that majority won, and they get to strengthen themselves and to make the world more to their image. Expect interesting times ahead.

[^1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elec...

Even more incredible is the amount of educated people who voted for Kamala in your link. It makes me question what “education” is these days if they put their votes behind someone who is so poor at communicating that her handles had to control everything.

Certainly less interesting times with Trump than the alternative, thank goodness.

It's really interesting to see America doing the same stuff as Weimar Germany. The institute for sexology was destroyed in 1933, so by my counting you've got about a year until you get your Führer.

What really bugs me as an onlooker is that I thought the constitution specified gun ownership precisely to prevent tyrannical governments (e.g. the English) and yet now there appears to be developing exactly that.

Not really. The idea of the constitution is that the US government is elected and therefore can't be tyrannical. The purpose of the 2nd amendment is almost certainly to maintain a force for the defence of the country against invasion. It's entirely obsolete now that America has a standing army.

Well, there's also the concept of owning guns to protect your liberty and there does seem to be a fair amount of liberty encroaching decisions going on (free speech seems to be taking a hammering).

And owning a gun is helping here how exactly?

Quite - that's my issue is that the reason given for gun ownership would make me think that persecuted groups would begin using their guns to prevent their persecution.

(I'm not trying to advocate gun ownership - I'm generally against that)

The roots of the 2nd amendment are way murky. Two contributing factors: 1) Guns were essential for controlling slaves 2) No-one trusted the US Army (partly because it was heavily associated with Alexander Hamilton)

I always thought it was derived from the English Bill Of Rights 1688: "That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law."

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/WillandMarSess2/1/2/intro...

(lots of other similarities there too)

Isn't there also something about availability and quality of the guns back in the days if 2nd amendment? Eg. they were expensive, bulky and slow to fire, whereas now they are neither.

The gun owners are largely the ones supporting this, because they want it to be tyrannical against Americans they don't like.

or because they're brainwashed to think this isn't tyranny and just regular policy

Those rights, like to bear arms and freely associate, only exist on paper. That they are in a state of nominal existence and practical abrogation serves to deradicalise and defuse resistance against the government, not encourage it.

At the moment conditions for a civil war (be it a real civil war or the historical USA civil war) aren't there, a lot of citizens entitled to 2nd amendment rights aren't exerting their right, a big lump of citizens are happy about the current state of affairs.

Trump is pretty popular right now, but ultimately his actions have not yet had any impact on his voters. They like his image.

But the real world will keep on happening. There will be inflation, unemployment, cost of living etc. Ultimately, as the experience of various European Trumps shows, this is what prevails. It doesn't even have to be Trump's faults or successes that buoy or sink him. I'm sure part of the reason he lost his first reelection bid was that COVID happened (and in itself that wasn't his fault), likewise Biden lost because inflation (again, largely not his fault).

Meanwhile, he doesn't strike me as someone who generally handles crises well. Problems will come, ones that materially affect his political base, and he will have to handle them well, or be serially lucky, or lose his power base.

So in short, I wouldn't assume any particular group of people will like him long-term just because they like him a few weeks in. They might. They might not.

EDIT to be clear, I don't wish Trump dead. I think that would be destructive to the US democracy and thus also bad for the world.

Americans will (and often do) insist that their "well regulated militia" is an absolute bulwark against tyranny, because their government cowers in terror of the wrath of an armed populace. Mention school shootings, mass shootings or any other kind of gun violence stats and they'll lecture you on your naivety, because all of that is a price worth paying for liberty in the only truly free society on earth. They'll wax poetic about "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants," and state “when the people fear the government, that's tyranny; when the government fears the people, that's freedom."

But Americans were more up in arms (literally) over the minor inconvenience of COVID restrictions than this. An imaginary communist plot to steal the election? Americans riot and try to burn down the Capitol. An actual authoritarian takeover of the executive branch takes place...

Because of course the Second Amendment isn't about defending liberty against tyranny, and never was. It's about white supremacists defending their privilege and their franchise for violence against an increasingly progressive and multicultural society, and has been since the days when the "well regulated militias" were used to suppress slave revolts and Native American uprisings.

And all of those guys with all of those guns will be just fine and dandy watching everything burn until the leopards-eating-your-face party finally turns on them as well.

As long as the tyrants hurt the right people, the gun owners will use their guns to protect the tyrants.

[The revolution will be bloodless if the left allows it to be](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/04/leader-of-the-pro-t...).

> As long as the tyrants hurt the right people, the gun owners will use their guns to protect the tyrants.

Thus, the liberal, woke people should change their stance on restricting gun ownership, and consider becoming gun owners, too. :-)

At the time the constitution was written, guns were among the most lethal weaponry available.

Not sure the same logic applies when the government has a monopoly on tanks, fighter jets, missiles and so on, which (despite the second amendment’s use of the broad term “arms”) citizens can neither keep nor bear.

Obligatory side note that the actual text of the second amendment reads very different to me than the modern discourse about it. Perhaps the “well regulated militia” bit was just as important as the “keeping and bearing arms” bit, in terms of keeping tyranny in check.

Such a cliché comment.

Have you ever considered that something is stated frequently because it is true?

Can't argue with that, works for people that consume Fox News and Breitbart.

The fact that lies can be repeated has no relevance on my position that this sentiment is repeated because it's true. If you want to argue with the statement, produce an argument instead of an unrelated sarcastic comment.

So you claim that something being repeatedly posted is a useful signal to determine if it's true, but you only apply it to something that you already believe is true.

But it somehow isn't a useful signal once it's something you personally don't know is true or believe is false. How does that make any sense?

Sounds like textbook confirmation bias. Should be included as a real life example in the definitions.

> you claim that something being repeatedly posted is a useful signal to determine if it's true

No I don't, you dolt. Learn which way the implication goes. "It is repeated because it's true" means something very different to "it is true because it's repeated". Here's an analogy of this conversation so you can understand how stupid you sound:

> Have you considered that he might be dying because he has cancer?

>> Can't argue with that, my granddad died and he didn't have cancer.

> The fact that people can die without having cancer has no relevance on my position that this person is died of cancer. If you want to argue with the statement, produce an argument instead of an unrelated sarcastic comment.

>> So you claim that someone dying is a useful signal to determine if they have cancer, but you only apply it to people who you already believe have cancer. But it somehow isn't a useful signal once it's someone you know doesn't have cancer. How does that make any sense? Sounds like textbook confirmation bias. Should be included as a real life example in the definitions.

Can people die of cancer? Can something be repeated because it's true? Who knows.

> Learn which way the implication goes. "It is repeated because it's true" means something very different to "it is true because it's repeated"

This makes it worse, not better, for your argument.

People repeat things all time because they think something is true, like the people you mention originally who are on "your side" of the political divide. They do the exact same thing even if they were misled into it, because they just don't know.

People on the right wing also repeat things on their social media, blogs etc. because believe it to be true.

Astroturfing and bots also repeat things to make them appear true.

So saying "It's repeated coz it's true" isn't a useful signal to determine if something is true or not, like you were claiming.

You're begging the question, in the proper use of term by assuming something is true in the first place.

https://www.scribbr.com/fallacies/begging-the-question-falla...

> A "begging the question" fallacy occurs when an argument assumes the truth of its conclusion within its premises, essentially using the very thing you are trying to prove as evidence to support it, creating a circular reasoning loop where no actual proof is provided; it's like saying "This is the best product because it's superior to all others.". > Key points about begging the question fallacy: > Circular reasoning: > This fallacy is often referred to as circular reasoning because it essentially repeats the conclusion in the premise, creating a loop where no new information is added to support the argument. > Assuming the conclusion: > The key aspect is that the argument takes the point it is trying to prove as already established fact without providing any independent evidence.

You provided no proof of the original except "it's repeated coz it's true" when the other commenter requested proof rather than just seeing repetitions.

People repeat falsehoods and exaggerations all the time like you did with your original comment, so that's not evidence of anything.

Also if people have to resort to childish personal insults then they're usually suffering from a hard case of the Dunning Kruger effect and are clueless about the fallacies they're suffering from.

I did not read this; I do not care.

That sounds like shorthand for saying you finally figured out you were wrong so couldn't come with a response addressing the topic, otherwise you wouldn't feel the need to reply at all.

Contrarian view: One "false-positive" example that a simplistic and sloppy "ctrl+F" caught is being highlighted to unfairly criticize a political proposal (in this particular case, dismissing DEI extremisms). This is old as the world.

Of course, the whole anti-DEI movement is based on finding one extreme example and then using it to delete entire government departments and fields of study.

In the end we just discord in one function: what to do in case of doubt? Cut or keep. Recent examples (Milei, Bukele) seem to favor the "cut" option.

So this is ok then? Sounds like you approve of the anti-DEI approach.

What is an appropriate false positive rate for canceling already approved research funding based on political motivations on a mass scale?

I'm sure this particular example will be gladly rolled-back. This "aggressive" stategy is working wonders in several quadrants. I recall Milei and Bukele.

What do you think it is?

How could it be classified as "unfair criticism" if the political proposal has made a very specific mistake in this instance? Should we not criticise a mistake simply because they are to be considered infallible or should we point it out so that they can learn and correct it? (Assuming that they are acting in good faith)

Free speech and criticizing mistakes is great but there's already comments comparing Trump's US to Weimar's Germany..

It's a very concerning and valid comparison.

I holidayed in Munich a couple of years ago and the Holocaust museum has a very instructive section that details a lot of specifics around Hitler's rise to power. I'm certainly seeing the same pattern beginning to happen in the U.S. with the "othering" of certain people and the clamping down on certain opinions/political leanings.

Are you suggesting that it's not a valid comparison, or that it's not safe to speak out against the administration?

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