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Comment by Yokohiii | Hacker News Reader

The comment is removed. I was also a bit confused, so I've looked it up. So a very rough overview: Under Trudeau in Canada some regulations around gender politics and climate change, got a bit out of hand in terms of absurd requirements to state how they are helpful in the matter. Even for trivial things, they were not a hard requirements but helpful.

Unlike the US gov in this post, they didn't slash projects with good intentions, they just changed and clarified the requirements.

Correction welcome, I am far away from canadian politics.

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Same. I welcome correction, but I need evidence first. I'm not saying there wasn't something silly going on, but the commenter made it seem like the Canadian government did the opposite of DOGE to the same degree rather than just encourage connections to broader societal impact. Such a claim needs to be sourced.

Interesting that an entirely true comment has been removed via flagging. I not only helped write grants during the peak of that trend, but reviewed applications where I was expected to evaluate how other applicants satisfied those priorities of the funding body.

I think warning about the other extreme is valid. But the way you wrote your comment it could be perceived as justification of the categorical slashing of grants by the trump administration. Which doesn't seem right either, because the progressive canadian policies are still in place, just less nonsensical.

You comment was also just made invisible due to low rating. Which can be disabled in settings. So my fault thinking it was deleted.

I can still read it; it’s just been downvoted afaict.

But it does seem like a bad comparison if what the other commenter said is true. I mean, here we’re talking about a lot of legitimate research being cut for absurd reasons.

There's a way of saying "we need to acknowledge that it's probably bad when either 'side' does this, due to our commitment to a deeper desire for truth", and the original comment ended up sounding more like "Well, liberals did it too". I think what we aspire to here is the former, which is helpful; the latter is polarizing and gets us further from core principles.

FWIW, I have a few professor friends who are generally liberal but were required to write yearly personal diversity statements by their administrations, and knew they were rewarded for putting pathos and hardship in their stories. They hated everything about it but felt that it would set their careers back to speak out against it. I think it's very valuable to have unpolitical discussions about these things, align on deep values, and come to a deeper understanding of how we can support one another--rather than falling into camps and pointing fingers.

Because it’s a stupid whataboutism

And also it doesn't justify the absurd overcorrection this admin has created.

This is not at all a reasonable response to a legitimate criticism of what many considered a pretentious overreach of the progressive movement. We can have a constructive discussion about all that.

But this level of insanity is another thing, and pointing out that it came about because the previous admin was incentivizing absurd behavior in the name of DEI or whatnot, is not doing their argument the kind of favour they expect

No, it's informative.

And a mention of morons being a transversal party of just occasional color, and a phenomenon that we have not finished assessing - a root cause in the shape revealed in this topics - is important here.

The comment isn't removed, it's [dead]. Turn on showdead in your profile and you can still see it.

thanks, didn't knew about that.

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