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Comment by frob | Hacker News Reader

The NSF funded my graduate research. It feels like someone is going through my past and burning all of the ladders that helped me grow and succeed.

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Same here. NSF funded my grad research and I have the same feeling. Seeing this nation eat its seed corn to fund some bullshit tax cuts makes me sick. None of this is theoretical. Talked to a Stanford prof two week ago- her DOE grant is on hold. Talked to some UCSD profs- and they said they only admitted just over half the number of grad students as last year due to funding uncertainty. I fear my kids might have to go to another country to get advanced training, and that next generation of American tech entrepreneurs will be fewer or lost.

I could never get beyond "honorable mention" for the NSF GRFP. I found the diversity part of it most difficult to write. Like honestly my research had nothing to do with diversity and I'm not an underrepresented minority myself. But that was a major part of how the application was scored, so you had to come up with some bullshit and hope for the best.

And that was like 15 years ago, I hear things have only gotten more extreme since then. Well, at least until very recently...

Grfp has always been prestigious. However many more professors themselves are funded from nsf grants they use to then pay for their grad students.

Those grants tend to have similar requirements.

They could have ended the diversity statements, but kept all the research.

They decided to end all the research too.

Yeah that's what I would have done. Don't get me wrong, I am very anti MAGA!

Which is kind of crazy... I'm here on the Internet ranting about DEI, and the MAGA movement is still toxic enough to completely alienate me. MAGA is probably worse than DEI.

MAGA is DEI for morons.

To be fair, they need jobs too! But giving them all the White House jobs does not seem fair or effective to me.

I would counter your anecdata with the 5 friends I have, all of whom are whiter than printer paper and 3 of whom are deeply conservative, who received GRFP. Your failure to get GRFP had nothing to do with the diversity statement.

Yeah anecdotes don't tell you much. You may have noticed I was also replying to an anecdote.

What tells you more is that the diversity statement exists and they say it's used as part of scoring. Therefore, unless the amount of score it counts for is infinitesimally small, some people win/lose based on the content of their diversity statement.

Was that me? Who knows. But unless the whole thing was just busy work for no reason, it was probably a bunch of people.

How many? Who knows. I'm sure you'd agree that it would be interesting if somebody published that data! Maybe the new NSF will be more transparent than the old one.

I think it's important to remember that, historically, science has been very racist and very sexist. It's not like the diversity statement came out of nowhere - the majority of our understanding of a lot of topics only comes from studying white men.

This is why AA men and women have significantly worse healthcare outcomes, or why women are more likely to die in a car crash.

Yes, maybe it's slightly inconvenient to write a diversity statement. But it's because of these types of initiatives that we're able to build more equitable research and improve outcomes for a variety of minority groups.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, suck it up. Or, at least, understand why they're asking for it instead of assuming it's some sort of strange, convoluted, personal attack on your character.

I will give you credit for having an explanation that at least makes more sense than "the diversity statement is just for fun and doesn't do anything", which is the explanation that I usually hear!

But yeah I am aware that the more reasonable DEI supporters say things similar to what you said. Just be aware that there are other people who are skeptical that the "improve outcomes for a variety of minority groups" part actually happens, and also think that DEI has various other negative consequences in addition to that.

I wouldn't really say I needed to "suck it up" since not winning the GRFP is a pretty minor thing - it's very hard to win, so a negative outcome was not really surprising and didn't really cost me anything more than a line on my resume. I was happy to even get honorable mention! My actual concern is when similar tactics are used for more meaningful things, and the second order effects of such policies. The GRFP was just the biggest example of it directly affecting me personally, since I didn't stick around in academia too long (for multiple reasons, not just DEI), so it makes a good enough anecdote I guess.

I feel this way as well. They're killing or gutting so many programs that help to develop the next generation. Not just NSF and NIH, but also Americorps, Job Corps, educational exchange programs like the Fullbright. I just saw they were making a 50% cut to the peace corps.

It feels like they want to destroy everything that's optimistic and forward-thinking.

Back when he won his first term, the local college newspaper's post-election edition had this headline (and subhead):

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Hate Wins.

The Only Way Is Forward.

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It was (and continues to be) a surprisingly pithy summary of the entire MAGA movement (and what we can do about it).

Similarly. My grad research was funded by an NSF project grant and my advisor's NSF CAREER. My postdoc supervisor just won his CAREER before the election.

was your research actually important or impactful in any way?

Because that is one of several goals. I heard a really interesting comment recently that concisely put what I find most dishonest about all this.

The opposite of DEI isn’t meritocracy it’s nepotism.

That is why you feel this way, the goal is to inhibit the success of those not part of the in group. The words bandied about about reverse racism and the like are just right wing propaganda.

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