Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaymaths | Hacker News Reader

consider though people are including "the line" because its a requirement of the grant. you can't on the one hand complain that the deletion of science is "politicization of science" when 40% + 90% * 40% of your science grants are awarded contingent on including a political statement. the science is already politicized

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.

View on HN

It is hard for me to understand how proposing some minor outreach goal (that would consume <5% of the budget) politicizes the science. Perhaps the outreach was politicized, but outreach is not science.

if it's not science why is it in the scientific grant?

Because you want outreach programs to promote science and scientific careers.

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...).

youre missing the point. if you want oureach, have outreach. dont staple it to a science grant.

It's the way it has been done since at least the 19th century, but sure.

just because things have always been done some way doent mean it's right nor even efficient. plenty of societal strategies have been ditched over the millennia.

Non-scientists get excited and engaged by participating inthe scientific process. Including undergraduates on a paper annotating Drosophila genes is head and shoulders more exciting than rediscovering some genetic principal published 70 years ago. The purpose of outreach is engagement, not simply checking off the outreach box.

I think you overstated the percentage of grants that include these "woke" terms. This dataset is going to be heavily biased towards grants that include lines like that. Without knowing what percent of total grants this dataset represents we don't have a good starting point to see how widespread this is. To get a really good sense of this, we'd need to also look at data from research proposals that didn't get funded.

have you ever applied for a scientific grant?

Is that relevant to this discussion? I don't see how it impacts the fact that you're drawing unfounded conclusions based on a cherry picked data set. The percentage of times those phrases appear in this data set tell us very little about the overall situation for grant funding.

> the science is already politicized

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.

ok, so you prefer to select for scientists who don't mind playing games instead of focusing 100% of their mental capacity on delivering scientific outcomes.

Everyone plays games, they fill out the grant proposal and forms as instructed and so on.

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.

the bogeyman is real. the quality of science is bad, we are having all sorts of crises in the sciences because in large part because the enterprise has selected for keeners who play games instead of honest people who do science. those honest scientists are quickly driven out and do other things with their lives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com