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Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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.

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?

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