Only About 40% of the Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science
astralcodexten.com
astralcodexten.com
Then they'll go and do the study about the dietary habits of red cockroaches that they intended to do all the time.
HN equivalent:
Want your pet project sponsored? Insert "AI" every 3 words and have investors pile up to give you money. Then do your pet project and insert random calls to the ChatGPT API to justify the "AI".
Like this one, maybe:
People eligible for DEI funding are often encouraged to choose that channel over a "regular" channel, in which they might easily have been awarded funding. This inevitable adaptation is what happens when one puts filters on cigarettes, designs tax laws... To cut this funding for existing awardees would be overt discrimination.
"Outreach" language is a requirement for NSF grants. I'm surprised that a majority of the grants overall didn't trigger their search filters. It is likely that they restricted their search to these DEI channels.
Of course Ted Cruz knows this. What I don't know is if he's actually a bigot, or a maggot who knows his supporters are bigots.
How many grants have been rejected simply because a scientist refused to shoehorn DEI language into a project that has nothing to do with it?
I'm all for studding that, but I honestly don't think the current administration actually cares... they care about any excuse for cuts.
I'm all for removing any requirement, but I don't agree that slapping a sentence means anything other than someone did what they thought would get them the grant.
I put "AI" in a project I'm working on for work, now I got attention, I don't "care" are about AI either way ;)
The sad part of overspending is that cuts are often needed for otherwise great things as well.
And regarding your questions. Very little if none because the requirement was not what you describe.
also elon doesn't understand what SQL is, so i'm assuming he's getting his minions to ctrl-f instead!
Kind of reminds me how the nazis would go after "jewish physics" [1], irrespective of the actual content of the research.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik?wprov=sfla1
If a grant for harvesting energy from radio frequency/WiFi mentions any woke point such as "promote equitable outcomes for ..."
...then its approval was tainted by wokeness - it doesn't matter that the main goal of the project itself isn't woke. It means grant money didn't go to another project that might be even more important but didn't pass the wokeness criteria because it didn't add those "kneel to Zod" keywords.
You can say it was a "false positive" and throw a tantrum but can't deny that the process was vitiated. Its approval didn't follow the strict goal of advancing science because of that shadow.
I think that's something that needs to be proven. The grant process is far more complex than just "included a sentence", they're evaluated by experts too.
Meanwhile the solution is to ctrl-f for "things that might mean what I don't like". The solution is more arbitrary, unscientific, and "kneel to Zod" than even the described problem.
Also none of this accounts for the possibility that a study might include words like "minority" and actually be of value, but under this kind of ctrl-f style cuts ... it could never be studied. So what are we talking about?
Required words bad, banned words good?
No, the burden of proof is on the opposite side. You don't take money from the people and from other projects, to throw at woke projects. There has to be some clean up, even more so since the government spending levels are at a crucial point.
And who is doing the Ctrl F cut? Has it happened already?
There wasn't any cut yet. Ctrl F would be the very first step in reexamining the entire set - of which the author of the article only looked at a 100.
The fact is that these complaints are against transparency and responsibility in this process, which is incoming and much needed.
The process of awarding grants is available for people to look at. Your claim is not.
I want to ask as respectfully as possible if you read the article?
These are vague claims made by a politician, he is not demonizing these grants because he wants them to continue ... the intent here is not a mystery.
I'm all for removing any strange inclusion type requirements, but maybe see what happens after you do that for a while?
But let's be honest, Cruz and the current administration don't care about that, they want people scared and to make cuts. "Woke" does that for them.
And that tactic of calling others names ("you're anti-science, anti-vaxx, anti-this, anti-that") is overused. Thankfully, no one outside your bubble is buying it anymore.
Second, is this a problem? Should all government grants have a strict goal of advancing science? Doesn't the government have a interest in spending money in ways that promote equitable outcomes?
Basically, the premise of the movie "Don't look up"? So if someone cares for another person, is that now woke and somehow negative?
So how can you even do a analysis of what is woke or not woke (I dont mean the BS stats that Cruz mentioned, i mean more in regards to the article).
Its basically an impossible task to identify as it has been setup in a way where anything inconvenient to someone can be blamed as woke.
Yes, there's been a lot of talk about rejecting the sin of empathy in "Christian" circles. https://wonderingpilgrim.com/2025/01/28/the-sin-of-empathy/ Goes over some of the arguments.
The VP, who is a practicing Catholic, has also been pushing a medieval Catholic theology known as "ordo amoris" which was rebutted by the pope himself https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2025/doc...
suppose i was a sickle cell researcher that absolutely was opposed to these sort of "woke" pronouncements on ethical grounds because it taints my science. i bet you I'd be denied the grant.
Eh I don't agree with that at all. If I know upper management has some silly catch phrase about say "synergies" and I write up an email advocating for allocating some resources for some RND and I mention synergies... that's all I'm doing, including something that's required. I don't care either way about "synergies", I care about the project.
I don't agree with requiring some things be included in a proposal, but everyone trying to persuade does it. That's not political, that's communication.
Also the whole "political" line is so empty these days. Because someone found a phrase via ctrl-f doesn't mean anything. "That's political" and such phrases are just empty ways to shout down something without having to give a reason.
We go to work and say good morning to our boss (I don't want to say good morning some days) and we roll on.
I'm all for removing any actual requirement, beyond that I think folks are falling for a flimsy excuse made just to make cuts and keep folks terrified of a boogie man.
Marie Curry, arguably one of the greatest scientist of the last century, the only one who got two nobel prize in two different categories, only got into science because of an underground outreach science program in Warsaw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_University).
She then immigrated in france, probably because French "Academie des Sciences" forgot to make a rule about not allowing women to make science, and was only hired to her first scientist job because... Of a science outreach program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9_d%27encourag...).
These grants were funded through normal nsf scientific processes by experts. The report refers to that funding as “diverted” because they don’t like the content, which is just manifestly dishonest. The are implying that the funding was stolen or decisions made maliciously.
That report does not have truth or valid data as an intent. His commentary at the end shows where this whole argument, and the larger rationalist movement, fails when it encounters the real world. To him the false positives are errors that affect the data and larger claims. To the people creating this false positives are beneficial because they dishonestly multiply the claims they are making. The tell is that it is so easy to do this analysis and no one bothered.
Both this response and the original report also fundamentally misunderstand how grant reviews and broader impacts work.
> It reflects poorly on the Biden administration that you could only get a grant to cure cancer if you suggested you might teach an underrepresented minority child about it.
Implying that this is specific to the Biden administration is taken as true by this re analysis. It has been a review criteria since the 90s. An honest attempt at this work (I’m not even sure that exists) begins by looking across administrations.
But honestly it’s only been in the last few years review panels began to care about broader impacts besides “yup it’s there”. Pi’s pick there own broader impacts work. Most of this is all congressional mandated.
Stop taking lying about things as counter argument because it’s not. This is why the rationalist movement will always fail in the face of reality.
I don't even know what anyone means by "woke" anymore.
I recall it having a definition, and then the "internet definition" and then that usage evolved ... and now I see woke now involved if someone just sees a female lead in a movie or something.
Meanwhile there are folks who seem terrified of this abstract concept of "woke". Someone on HN created an account to comment to me about how they've had LGBTQ "shoved down their throats" but they couldn't actually say how.
It's not that deep really, just a scarecrow they brandish everytime they want to discredit something, anything.
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/31/774918215/obama-says-democrat...
This sounds like a Temu version of the "Un-American Activities Committee" you had in the 50-70s.
That entire second group in this article, is talking about a set of things that relate to one of two NSF review criteria. One is intellectual merit, which is pretty much what you think. The other, is what this is all related to is called or impacts. The broader impact review criteria were developed in the mid 90s on direction from Congress to ensure that science funded by the government, benefits society and the public in a set of particular ways. As with the science, PI’s get to choose what types of broader impact activities they do. As with the science itself, you and I might find some of them an interesting or even to testable, but if they meet the review effectively, the funding is not because of what they do because they met the criteria.
There are valid arguments for and against the entire world abroad impacts in NSF research. This isn’t a conversation that is part of that arguments for against. Instead, this is a child who knows nothing about it, screaming and demanding attention over people who do.
Class warfare? Finally one of them says the quiet part out loud because that's what all this 'anti-woke' crap is actually about. Our rights are the 'woke' that they're waging their war against. The culture wars were artificially created to keep us from fighting a class war against our economic oppressors.