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Comment by qcnguy | Hacker News Reader

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Its not fraud. The grant proposal accurately describes the research occurring, and people evaluating the grant will have no misconception about what they are funding. The problem is that political appointees have been applying dumb keyword searches which block research that has nothing to do with the issues they object to. Like using privilege in the computer security sense. Or bias in the statistical sense, unrelated to political leaning.

Take a look at the comments left by that profile. I don’t think that they would be able to understand what you are saying here, all they see is red.

A partial recent comment “qcnguy” made: “DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Requiring the PSF to dump DEI if they want the money is good for everyone, because DEI is bad for people”

It's worth pointing out that this profile has been around for three months and already has enough karma to have access to the "flag" and "vouch" tools.

Even on HN, we're still human and hungry for controversy.

It's also worth pointing out that despite this thread being full of ridiculously low quality posts, I haven't flagged any of them. That's the sort of thing DEI leftists do, not everyone.

It doesn't matter if you have used them in this thread or not. An account of your age and your disposition should not have access to automated moderation tools, period.

Moderation via easily gamified populism is the worst kind of moderation.

Because the leftists flagging and downvoting everything they disagree with in this thread are clearly exemplars of excellent user moderation? Knock it off.

> exemplars of excellent user moderation

This is a contradiction. There's no such thing, only shades of bad, and HN has about the worst possible implementation.

For what it's worth, I didn't flag or downvote you. YC is seemingly fine with your behavior, and I've seen much worse out of people who have been here longer. I'd rather your mask-off rants be out in the open than swept under the rug.

The requirements the GP is describing are to avoid using certain words. It's not fraudulent to describe the same work without using the banned words.

That's definitely not the requirement! The requirement is to avoid doing certain kinds of "research" that the government disagrees is valid research to fund, characterized by the principles underlying it.

They may have started by using certain keywords to find examples of such grants to terminate, but the requirement itself has nothing to do with words and everything to do with the intentions.

The “requirements” are vague and still being litigated against congressional intent, but the problem is the scale: when you have so many complex things to review and only a few trusted political apparatchiks, they end up doing things like simple keyword searches for terms like “diversity” and “inclusion” blithely aware of those being used in fields such as geology.

I know this because I know people who’ve had to take time away from their research to keep their grants from being cancelled.

I know someone whose grant was cancelled for studying genetic diversity in animal populations.

And maybe they'll get that back eventually, but academia can't complain about rough handling when it steadfastly refused as a bloc to fix its own ways for so long. Outsiders trying to fix them will always create a lot more collateral damage than insiders fixing the problems, but when insiders refuse, outsiders will take over.

Also, frankly, I heard a bunch of such stories and very often the grantees were misrepresenting their work. It actually did have DEI content in it and they were pretending it didn't. You can see how many people in this thread are arguing that all you have to do to comply with the requirements are use a thesaurus or misrepresent their work and then continue anyway. For as long as academics insist on total warfare and malicious compliance, expect universities to be blowtorched.

this and many other grants were singled out because of words used in their description. you seem quite certain that 'diversity' here isn't referring to the degree to which the genome of these animals is similar to different to other of their species, but instead a leftist dogwhistle hiding racist intent, and this researcher lost their position because they are really a secret racist and deserves to be 'blowtorched'.

you celebrate the ruin of the career of a highly trained person, frankly a national resource, because they used a word to describe their work that you think has evil connotations.

we are so screwed

I'd love to know what those stories are.

I should have been clear that it’s particularly with respect to word choice. All of the research we’re doing is accurately described by the proposal. It’s just codified in this weird new way of speaking where you can’t say certain trigger words which offend the snowflakes up top.

For me personally, I really don’t care if it’s grant fraud or not. We’re doing research into how to improve the healthcare and quality of life of less privileged groups. Our work is about helping people, full stop. It’s one of the best ways I could ever want my tax money being spent.

> I really don’t care if it’s grant fraud or not.

Right, academics think they're above the law and that it's OK to lie to conservatives to advance their agendas. So why should anyone believe you, when you say it's all above board? If you don't care about engaging in financial fraud you don't care about misrepresenting things on Hacker News either, for sure.

The culture of dishonesty and extremism in academia is why it will eventually be liquidated. Expect to see academic funding driven to zero and university property seized in future. There will be no more academics. It'll take years, but mass lawlessness of that kind won't be tolerated forever.

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