[dgacmu]

One of the explicit goals of the NSF is to train the next generation of scientists. Part of that is making sure that you're creating a rich pipeline of people who are going to do innovative things. Broadening participation is much more about things like getting more (usually younger) people from all walks of life interested in joining your field. Which is basically an unmitigated good -- first, the obvious advantage that having more people who want to be in a field is good for it from the perspective of choosing the best folks. And second, the less obvious but perhaps more important thing that people with different perspectives often end up thinking about problems differently. It's not nearly as helpful to have 1000 people all focused on chasing the same problems with the same toolbox of solutions as it is to have 1000 people focused on different problems with different ideas of how to approach them.

I say this as a professor at a top computer science department. I have _never_ felt limited in my ability to collaborate with the best folks in my area. Ever. I do! And it's great! And I also believe strongly it's important to make sure we are growing those next generations of amazing people, because the thing that makes research awesome is working with them.

[notahacker]

Also, tickbox "I've considered this issue" questions which don't actually stop you from receiving grant funding with a team of middle aged, white male citizens from privileged educational backgrounds is not remotely the same as a clause enabling the administration to arbitrarily cancel your contract mid way through your project.

Especially not when said administration has a track record of cancelling things because they Ctrl-Fed outgroups they considered to be the enemy and discovered a completely irrelevant Latin prefix in someone's abstract.

[izacus]

Now that's double standard here, isn't it? Putting up questions on forms that require you to reveal your political pole and follow the politics of one party to answer isn't really kosher in any academic environment.

Trying to reframe them as "we didn't REALLY mean it!" (while also insulting a race and sex) doesn't help your case.

This is what the communist leads of universities did here in eastern europe and it was disgusting back then as well.

[notahacker]

Yeah, me pointing out the people exactly like me totally can and do fill in boxes like this and secure grants is totally "insulting a race and sex". I thought it was supposed to be the libs who were grievance mongers desperate to feel discriminated against...

Honestly, if filling in those boxes with anything other than a diatribe against the suitability of women and minorities and poor people to do research is "following the politics of one party" now, that says more about the conformance demanded by the other party than the science. Good to hear you're much happier now they're in charge and introducing formal komissar roles to ensure that any studies whose results contradict RFK Lysenko Jr or reference transgenic mice or Transjordan or employ too many research assistants with funny foreign names are liable to be defunded before publication.

[izacus]

If filling those boxes was so easy, you won't have issues filling up republican boxes with content they want to hear to get funding, right?

That's what happens when academia politicizes themselves - they become part of the game. And that means begging for scraps of who ever is currently on the top.

It's horrible... but you said yourself - you just need to fill some boxes correctly.

[notahacker]

Except, of course, that it isn't a matter of simply filling in checkboxes stating how research is going to contribute towards Americans' greatness. It's a matter of mass retrospective cancellation of research funding and the replacement of peer review with commissar review by the sort of people that can't tell the difference between transgenic and transgender and block the publication of studies if they don't align with the administration's position on vaccines

Nobody honestly believes the two are equivalent.

Ultimately an argument that an application question with option for researchers to state they have an equal opportunities policy is as much of an imposition as legislating for studies to be retrospectively defunded if the clinical outcomes don't align with the administrations' preferred pseudoscience says more about you than it does about past politicization of science...

[steve_adams_86]

I would say this is exactly where you want that kind of policy. At the bottom, where you’re cultivating what will end up at the top. You want the diversity of ideas for exactly the reasons you stated.

People get upset as though this policy is dictating that a minority from the corner of the earth with no meaningful experience is going to be mandated into the role of heart surgeon or airplane pilot as well. That’s not how this works. However, those roles themselves stand to benefit from the diversified cultivation at the bottom of the stack, eventually.

Even very intelligent people seem to think inclusive policies mean that incompetent people will be promoted in private industry or government, but frankly, I never witnessed that to any abnormal degree until the people decrying it the most ended up in power. A game show host as president. A Fox News anchor as secretary of war. I can only keep a straight face because I’m so jaded by it.

[somenameforme]

The reason most people dislike these policies is because filtering people for having one set of wanted checkboxes is functionally identical to punishing people for having a different set of implicitly unwanted checkboxes. You are trying to combat discrimination by engaging in discrimination. Discrimination is discrimination, even if well intended.

And it's not even clear what issue they're supposed to be solving. Visit any STEM class, research lab - corporate or public, or so on even well before any of these sort of things began to be official guidelines and it was anything but homogeneous, even by the largely irrelevant characteristics that these guidelines target.

[bonsai_spool]

> The reason most people dislike these policies is because filtering people for having one set of wanted checkboxes is functionally identical

Not functionally identical. No grants were getting slow-rolled or cancelled.

Why are you having a hard time understanding this?

> And it's not even clear what issue they're supposed to be solving. Visit any STEM class, research lab - corporate or public, or so on even well before any of these sort of things began to be official guidelines and it was anything but homogeneous, even by the largely irrelevant characteristics that these guidelines target.

Hmm. Do you think it was an accident that these settings are not homogeneous today? Do you think these settings were different in the past? Did you spend any time trying to test your hypothesis before writing and posting it?

[somenameforme]

Your reading comprehension is remarkably low.

[bonsai_spool]

I am just ignoring obvious propaganda - no reason to accept lies that are designed to set up a straw man

[xp84]

I don’t really disagree with the closing quip about those guys’ (lack of) qualifications. But I think what upsets a lot of people (including me) is that if you’re Asian or white, and male, graduating with a 4.5 and doing literally everything right, the Democrats tell us it’s virtuous to have a quota system screen you out of the most competitive schools so that someone of an “underrepresented” race/gender expression, someone who has not achieved the same, can get in.

It was idiotic to squander the talent of the best and brightest Black people that way 75 years ago, and it’s just as idiotic to use race and gender as a factor in admissions or employment today.

[steve_adams_86]

I’m not convinced my demographic is discriminated against so much as the playing field is levelled to some degree, because discrimination already occurred in our favour.

The nice thing about regulated discrimination is that it can be an editable, transparent, public document that can be voted on and driven by data. This is better, even if imperfect, than the kind we have when we’re not honest about it.

I’m not saying it’s perfect or wholly good. Just, arguably better. I see a lot of problems with it. It’s a bandaid on deep social and systemic problems.

If anything I appreciate that it’s in the open.

Regardless, I’ve done well in my career at times someone else could have done better. I saw it when I managed hiring processes. Discrimination was everywhere. But I was there, I was white, I was male. That was good enough. I certainly wasn’t the best for the job. There’s something wrong with that in my opinion. I should have had to try harder at times. It would have been better for everyone. How do we fix that?

[xp84]

First, you cannot know if "discrimination" gave a positive boost to a kid from looking at their skin. Poor white and Asian kids can have all the same disadvantages (or more) than a randomly-selected Black kid. You can only make such a claim in the aggregate. The punishments applied by the quota systems that Democrats embrace, however, are applied individually to all members of the races deemed "too represented." That's what makes it so odious (and it's why those of us who used to proudly identify as "Strong Democrat" 15 years ago have always hated racist policies.)

The punitive institutionalized discrimination being extended against Asians merely because they on average do better at school than other ethnic groups really drives home how unfair this is. I'd go so far as to claim that no structural/institutional factors have boosted Asian kids. They do better (better than the white kids) probably because their parents value education the most, due to a shared cultural value. Our society's response to that shouldn't be to treat those kids as surplus unneeded human capital because of where their ancestors were born.

> Discrimination was everywhere... I was white, I was male... I certainly wasn’t the best for the job.

Well, if that truly did happen to you (you interviewed all those competing for the positions and knew who was best?) then yeah, that's quite racist. The solution to racism isn't "More racism, but flipped against whoever's done better recently." We already had the actual solution figured out many years ago, and it's judging people only by their merits.

[expedition32]

In my country white males actually started to believe in their own bullshit so they let a little Jewish girl take the medical exam as a joke.

They immediately regretted it but the results were already printed in the newspapers. The rest as they say is history.