DOGE canceled NC Museum grant for HVAC systems after ChatGPT flagged it as DEI | Hacker News Reader

DOGE canceled NC Museum grant for HVAC systems after ChatGPT flagged it as DEI

myfox8.com

84 pointscldwalker18 comments

Open articleView on HN

Somebody tweeted the other day they'd had their 600k grant cancelled because of the word "polarization".

It was a physics grant for research related to light polarization.

I remember seeing a similar one for a math grant. Cohomology is pretty gay, though.

The grant was for $349,000.

There's an old joke about a billion here and a billion there, but this is 0.00035 billion.

DOGE asserted it would save $2 trillion. Their own web site claims about 10% of that, and that number is likely exaggerated by as much as an order of magnitude.

Nor is it a work in progress. DOGE has already disbanded.

It was clearly about harassing ideological opponents, and they couldn't even get that right.

Meantime, the US federal budget outlays have gone up by $400 billion from $7 trillion in 2025 to $7.4 trillion in 2026.

  DOGE asserted it would save $2 trillion.

The ketamine must have been particularly active that day. Look at the US budget, then look at the bits you can't touch (Medicare, Social Security, income security, veterans, etc), and try and figure out where you're going to save $2 trillion on what's left.

Mind you for an administration that just makes shit up as required it's par for the course.

Maybe the news has distorted a bit after crossing the Atlantic, but waren't there substantial outrages after the bits that couldn't be touched had in fact been touched?

About a quarter of a Tomahawk used to kill 160 girls in an Iranian school because the target selection people failed to do any surveillance or research.

And that 10% of 2 trillion they claimed to have saved on their website has already been debunked as a fabrication

ChatGPT determined that this was related to DEI, responding, “Yes. Improving HVAC systems enhances preservation conditions for collections, aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences. #DEI.”

Well, case closed.

Is this a real quote?

Half way down or so.

The original article title is "DOGE canceled High Point Museum grant for HVAC systems after ChatGPT flagged it as DEI, lawsuit alleges" but I modified it so it could fit the character limit

If the goal of DOGE was really to reduce "waste, fraud and abuse", wouldn't a human be checking for false positives? If anything, mistakenly cancelling a grant sounds like waste or abuse.

> If the goal of DOGE was really to reduce "waste, fraud and abuse"

It wasn't. DOGE was never anything but another grift designed to benefit administration insiders, with maybe - at best - a thin veneer of "reducing waste" to satiate the appetite of the gullible people backing all of this in the first place.

DOGE killed unknown perhaps millions of people around the world needlessly, ended careers, destroyed institutional knowledge and capabilities, and costed the US several billion $, prestige, soft power, and respect that can never be repaired.

Another DOGE staffer explaining how he flagged grants at NEH for "DEI"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47352819

AI is so stupid it enables third parties to be stupider. It's a new type of cognitive deficit.

The problem is broader -- it is risked with everyone using LLMs for classification. Via a shallow application, the usage fails to model uncertainty, calibrate uncertainty if modeling it, and the users fail to understand the costs and consequences of misclassification.

Interesting they found ChatGPT more useful than Grok.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com