8 ms·
Words flagged in search of current NSF awards
- drawkward 2y agothus begins the end of pax americana; you can't have a space-age economy if you don't have science.
- glitchc 2y ago[flagged]
- drawkward 2y agoif you think the term "women" is only relevant in social science and pop psychology, it begs the question whether you are informed enough to have an opinion worth considering.
- 9283409232 2y agoYou think only social sciences use the words "bias" and "gender?"
- footy 2y agohi my partner is a neuroscientist and multiple words on this list appear on any one of her proposals. She doesn't even work with humans. If you think this only affects social sciences you don't have the requisite knowledge to have an opinion here.
- jeffbee 2y agoIsn't "Space Age" derogatory at this point? That's how I use it: to mean something that is obsolete.
- platybubsy 2y agoI haven't heard it be used like that before. It definitely has a positive association in my mind.
- jeffbee 2y agoYou should consider whether you might in fact be old!
- alaxhn 2y ago[flagged]
- immibis 2y agoAlso... if you stop trading with everyone else. One of the USA's main power sources is controlling the world reserve currency. This means that every other country imports inflation from the USA, in exchange for delivering vast quantities of useful goods and services to the USA. Without this special status, the USA will have to export as much as it imports. "Controlling the world reserve currency" and "Having a massive trade deficit" are the same word, since trade deficit is how much stuff other countries sent you without you having to send stuff to them, which is how much currency you sent to those countries. Trump says he wants to eliminate the trade deficit.
- T3RMINATED 2y ago[dead]
- j7ake 2y agoRIP statisticians and Ml researchers who use the word “bias” in their work.
- manvillej 2y agoRIP Academia as a whole
- whatshisface 2y agoIn 2055, anti-wokeists will have banned "bias," and wokeists will have banned "weight." Following defeat in the pan-Eastern bent ground war, hawks will ban "loss." They will be renamed plusses, and double plusses, and ungood.
- drawkward 2y agogood. /s
- footy 2y ago"historically" is on this list
- bhouston 2y agoI think that relates to talking about history in a way that may make white people feel bad about it: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/01/florida-sb-148-racism-discomfort?srsltid=AfmBOoqsIHHpo4jrrIH5E6oPln8dSOYb5GOEm2sQjfjgqXq9GeMNygwj https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/01/florida-sb-148-racis...
- drawkward 2y agoAre you trying to justify or explain?
- bhouston 2y agoI don't support this action by Trump and I am linking to an article that criticizes the Florida bill. But it is trying to explain/justify why this word may be banned based referencing the ideological background that is motivating it.
- 9283409232 2y agoList of words includes: female, females, and women. Does not include words like: male, males,and men. Party of free speech that wants to protect women according to their supporters.
- sincerecook 2y ago[flagged]
- drawkward 2y ago[flagged]
- sincerecook 2y agoThat's literally what the quote says: "From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled". And then it goes on to quote a long list of words that would be characteristic of woke social science "research".
- drawkward 2y ago[flagged]
- sincerecook 2y agoYou're not being very charitable, have you considered that you may be letting your biases have an undue influence on your judgement here?
- 9283409232 2y agoI would flip this back on you. They gave a very good example of these rules being used for censorship with DeSantis prosecuting scientist for reporting numbers. Selective enforcement is a known thing so is your affection for the people in charge stopping you from seeing the obvious problem here?
- slackfan 2y agoFreedom of speech does not imply freedom of funding.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- theossuary 2y ago> Freedom of speech does not imply freedom of funding. The first amendment is specifically about preventing government reprisals for speech. If I would have won a federal grant, but was denied it because I said "trans rights," that's the definition of a first amendment violation.
- o11c 2y agoYou're wrong in this case. All you have to do is replace the target and it becomes obvious. If a scientist currently or previously spammed papers of the form "why Nazis were right all along", we should all hope the government doesn't fund that subject or person. The mass retraction of previously published papers is ethically concerning, but choice of who/what to fund in future is always completely in-scope for leadership to choose, regardless of whether you agree with the particular decision.
- theossuary 2y agoYou're too gullible if you think these purity tests aren't going to be applied outside of the grant applications themselves. This is clearly an attempt to isolate out "woke" scientists and researchers, irrespective of what they're researching.
- o11c 2y agoGullibility has nothing to do with the logical question of "is this a free speech concern or not, and if it is is it in the subset covered by the Constitution?" You can't oppose chaos while giving up on rigor yourself.
- 2y ago
- bhouston 2y agoI am so disheartened by the term "free speech" in political usage because it does seem to me mostly a rallying call to actually ban speech that the user of the term dislikes. I look to how "cisgender" is treated on X worse that most actual ethnic slurs: https://www.fastcompany.com/91126082/elon-musk-x-cisgender-cis-slur https://www.fastcompany.com/91126082/elon-musk-x-cisgender-c... Very few actually want to apply it equally to both their side and the opposing side. I did notice this one group called FIRE that actually does a pretty decent job of applying free speech rights relatively equally, I think we should support it more: https://www.thefire.org https://www.thefire.org
- techbananas 2y agoI’m curious what will happen to FIRE over the next few years. Presumably a lot of their funding over the past few years has come from right leaning sources and presumably they’re going to have to change their tack with the new folks in power.
- larsiusprime 2y agoFIRE has been around for decades and has dutifully resisted acquiring a partisan valence
- mikeyouse 2y agoUnfortunately a number of the legal minds behind these terrible laws are former FIRE alum, it was a real bummer when I saw multiple resumes with stints at FIRE.
- jimmar 2y agoAnybody have the actual source of the list? It purports to be from a program officer, but how do we know?
- bhouston 2y agoScience article on it: https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-nsf-starts-vetting-all-grants-comply-trump-s-orders https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-nsf-starts...
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoCan I see a source for “forbidden” or “banned”? I see the author claiming these words get “flagged”, but also no source other than his post. Surely HN users wouldn’t be so quick to just believe a random mastadon post because it aligns with their own <flagged words>, right?
- bhouston 2y agoDetails here in Science: https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-nsf-starts-vetting-all-grants-comply-trump-s-orders https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-nsf-starts...
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- elashri 2y agoIn particle physics we usually use these terms which will be at any proposal. This is an interesting textbook definition of false positives when you have list that is using too common words. - Minimum "Biased" data - "Discrimination" or "Discriminatory" variables - Phase space "excluded" - "Inclusion" of data/variable/anything - "inequality" -> wow bell's inequality and all this theory work about inequalities will be triggered These are just example that came into my mind from quick thought and skimming. I'm pretty sure that this will have much worst false positive rate. I would really be surprised if the vast majority if not all of projects get flagged. I'm also sure that 100% of statistics work or project heavily reliant on statistics (probably everything else too) will be flagged.
- aeve890 2y agoAlso "polarization".
- anotherhue 2y agoDoes that fall under global warming denial?
- kardianos 2y ago[flagged]
- whatshisface 2y agoWhere is the government going to find all these censors with working minds? No American would consent to doing that unless their zeal had blinded them from something much more important than the compliance of a physics paper.
- sterlind 2y agoI'm sure DOGE could provision an LLM to censor at scale. Unthinkingly obedient language models enforcing dictates is an authoritarian's wet dream.
- 2y ago
- barbazoo 2y ago[flagged]
- bhouston 2y agoIn what way? This is a list of words to identify applications that the Trump admin wants to deny grants to. Isn't that restricting research quite broadly based on very ideological grounds? This isn't about US research priorities, it is just political interference.
- ajp-stl 2y agoflagged != forbidden
- drawkward 2y agoi am curious: do you actually believe the lies that you are parroting? i would hope you were not so easily fooled by these obvious liars.
- lelanthran 2y agoYouvegone through this entire thread calling everyone who points out that the title is misleading gullible or evil. The title is literally different to the article; people complaining that review is not the same as banned aren't evil in the same way that people who complained about master vs main weren't evil.
- drawkward 2y agoIn point of fact, I have been asking whether they are parroting lies or gullible. This type of "review" is simple McCarthyism. DeSantis, in Florida, has shown us how this goes. The Trump admin is doing this on a pretext of removing politics from science, when it is demonstrably injecting politics into science.
- 2y ago
- gorpnuts 2y ago[flagged]
- hotpepperishot 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ashton314 2y ago“Female” is taboo, but “male” is not. Um… yikes. Molly White posted something yesterday: “you have a lot more in common with the ‘other people’ than you have with the people in power.” https://fosstodon.org/@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io/113942152254233632 https://fosstodon.org/@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io/1139421522542...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoMolly White is a good egg
- drawkward 2y agofor a group of people who wants to get politics out of science, they sure just injected a bunch of politics into science. MAGA is a death cult.
- zellyn 2y agoWhy did this just plummet to page three? Very weird. [Edit] A few seconds later, I cannot find it no matter how many times I click "more".
- drawkward 2y agobecause the comment section is going to be a shitshow, just like the Trump administration.
- bhouston 2y agoIt was "flagged" by users.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago[flagged]
- drawkward 2y agoyou are parroting the obvious lies of known liars. my question to you is: are you complicit, or gullible?
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago[flagged]
- yodon 2y ago> Why did this just plummet to page three? Very weird. People are getting into upvote/downvote wars over comments on the post. When that happens, the HN algorithm automatically downranks the post as likely to drive bad behavior among users.
- glitchc 2y agoSome users would like to ban the article that discusses the ban since it contains comments that they don't like about said ban.
- ghostDancer 2y ago
- sam345 2y ago[flagged]
- drawkward 2y agoyour comment is being flagged because you are using terms that the zeitgeist does not approve of... do you think that is reasonable? now, apply that to science funding.
- TheAceOfHearts 2y agoWhat I find most disappointing and frustrating is that accessibility has gotten caught in the crosshairs of this anti-DEI crusade. I expect this will lead to a lot of suffering among the most vulnerable groups of people.
- theossuary 2y agoAccessibility was always DEI, heck DEIA was a common term too. The entire point of the ADA is (was?) to provide equity and inclusion for disabled people. That's the difference from everyone equally having access to stairs, vs everyone equitably having access to the second floor. It's including people in wheelchairs and who have speech impediments, instead of excluding them. It's been clear from the beginning that getting rid of equity and inclusion included disabled people; does nobody remember when Trump made fun of the disabled reporter in his first term? He hates them.
- glitchc 2y agoThat's truly a shame. And I don't believe accessibility is the same as DEI.
- drawkward 2y ago[flagged]
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoTitle is misleading. Words are not forbidden or banned. Submissions with these words may get additional review.
- drawkward 2y ago[flagged]
- comrade_dang 2y ago[dead]
- acc_297 2y agohttps://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092-4246-91A5-58EEF99750BC#page16 https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092... (report from October 9, 2024 released by Ted Cruz) https://www.science.org/content/article/amid-uncertainty-here-s-what-trump-s-victory-might-mean-u-s-science https://www.science.org/content/article/amid-uncertainty-her... (Science article from November 6 which briefly discusses the Cruz report)
- ykonstant 2y ago[flagged]
- thinkingemote 2y agoMods can unflag a story if they deem it important, high quality, giving new information etc. Also "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Perhaps users saw the quality of the comments and chose to flag, or perhaps they saw the quality of the submission. I also think there's an auto-flag mechanism that kicks in automatically. I don't know how that works, but I'm guessing if I was to write one it would detect patterns of downvotes in comments, number of users who upvoted the submission vs number of comments, and the use of negative and emotional language.
- ykonstant 2y ago[flagged]
- comrade_dang 2y ago[dead]
- greenie_beans 2y agoi guess we're gonna have to come up with new euphemisms
- Yizahi 2y agoI remember how "master" and "slave" were banned a few years back in information technology context and people cheered that ban. And surprise surprise, the same mechanism of arbitrary bans can be turned 180 degrees. And it appears that if the only criteria is a superficial offense at the established word unrelated to the imaginary offense, then many different people can use that same mechanism to ban or attack whatever they want. From all sides of the political spectrum. Who knew, right?:) PS: I'm against any word bans with a very few extreme exceptions. Blanket bans for whatever random person deems offensive inevitably led to this^. Like clockwork, every single time.
- whatshisface 2y agoSince what we're looking for is a peace that eliminates collateral damage, perhaps the best course would be to reassure both sides that they can have security without having control.
- Yizahi 2y agoIn my opinion government focus should be on the education of young people, and not on trying to force and bend adults to behave in the narrow "correct" way. Again, with some exceptions. If we want more female representation in STEM - focus on education. If we want people not to use some slur or derogatory term - teach people in the school. And so on. The problem is that across the world education is a third tier activity for the government and is largely neglected. No big profits there.
- whatshisface 2y agoSome people will choose to antagonize men or women even after being made aware of the facts. That's why people who are unwilling to tolerate a low level of bad behavior and the after-the-fact nature of punishment wind up demanding absolute and preemptive control over everybody else.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago> If we want more female representation in STEM - focus on education. You also have to introduce rules for hiring – unless you want your interventions to have an 80-year delay on them. (Or we could make unqualified 18-year-olds responsible for hiring decisions, I suppose.) If you're training children up for careers they're going to be kept out of, you're doing everyone a disservice.
- amiga386 2y agoIt's chilling that the new administration's first priority is to defund projects that don't agree with their ideology, and make an explicit show of it. That said, this specific post is over-egging the post it's quoting. The original post is https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:aixj65vnqpllcjnc4ante42b/post/3lhcvn4hxwk2o https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:aixj65vnqpllcjnc4ante42b/po... by Darby Saxbe at USC, leaking materials from an NSF Program Officer. She says these are words that "can cause a grant to be pulled". What she's leaking appears to be inference done, over a partial set of "flagged" awards, and the keywords drawn from them. It does not say this is the official list of keywords. The accompanying decision tree - what the NSF is being ordered to do - says if the "keywords and context" of various parts of the grant application "implicate" Trump's executive orders (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14151 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14151), then they must keep the flag and mark that they found "DEIA and other EO language" -- but if not, they can remove the flag. So if you proposed "Systemic analysis of the bigliest cofeve all women find irresistible", you'd likely get funded, because the context reveals you're a big Trump suck-up, even if you used words like "systemic" and "women". What I get from the original post is the word "systemic" is not actually banned, and may not even be a "keyword" causing awards to be "flagged". But if you're dependent on a grant from NSF for your livelyhood, you obviously want the greatest chances of being funded, and simply not knowing what the orange one is going to fuck about with next, or what exactly he's instructed people to do, is a great cause of anxiety. That's information asymmetry, and it's a form of power in itself. And he's already fucked about by stopping all funding immediately and only adding it back after review. But don't let posts that are also unofficial add to your anxiety.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- anthony_d 2y agoIs there any official confirmation of this? A random post on mastodon about a random post on bluesky isn’t really very meaningful.
- nickthegreek 2y agoI'd imagine by "official confirmation" you don't mean the government that is currently shutting down their websites, scrubbing data and destroying the idea of transparency. The concept of trust has flown right out the window. If I had to chose who to believe on this topic right now, sadly, it would in fact be this random post on bluesky. thats not the america i want to live in, but it does appear to be the one we are currently in.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoTruthfully, the words are not "forbidden". Using them in a grant application might decrease the chances of receiving a grant. Nothing stops anyone from using them.
- sterlind 2y agoJust like getting demonetized on YouTube, then. Maybe we'll see grant proposals to study "dis@bility progression in Multiple Sclerosis", "light p0larization" and "weights and b!ases"
- EdwardDiego 2y ago"A systematic review of studies on the possible relationship between high lead levels in soil, and rates of unaliving."
- outlore 2y agocorporate wants you to find out the difference between these two pictures…
- honeybadger1 2y ago[flagged]
- rsynnott 2y agoThat hashtags-of-interests thing is a standardish Mastodon style. Used to be somewhat common on Twitter about a decade ago iirc. Mastodon’s original core user base is largely people who left Twitter in 2016, so it preserves a few fossilised old-Twitter things.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- enoch_r 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Dig1t 2y agoHere’s a relevant XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/ I was shown this back in college when I raised concerns about how cancel culture was stifling the free exchange of ideas and when I argued against the idea that speech was the same thing as violence. I guess if this is the world we live in the same thing applies in the other direction. “The first amendment doesn’t shield you from criticism or consequences” “It’s just that people listening think you’re an asshole” “And they’re showing you the door”
- rurp 2y agoDon't worry I'm sure when Musk, the self proclaimed Free Speech Absolutist, hears about this he'll require them to reverse course immediately.
- latentcall 2y agoYes and I’m sure if he’s on board with this somehow, that it’s for a really good reason!
- cozzyd 2y agoWell my last successful NSF award certainly uses the word polarization... In the context of electromagnetic fields....