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DOGE Bro's Grant Review Process Was Literally Just Asking ChatGPT 'Is This DEI?'
- jgbuddy 8mo agoSimple, cheap and fast
- McGlockenshire 8mo ago"Simple, cheap, fast," and somewhere between inaccurate and wrong. From the article: > To flag grants for their DEI involvement, Fox entered the following command into ChatGPT: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.” He then inserted short descriptions of each grant. Fox did nothing to understand ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” as used in the command or to ensure that ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” matched his own. The culture warrior understanding of the term "DEI" does not reflect reality. The prompt is trash. Garbage in, garbage out. This is somehow even stupider than similar reports of grants being canceled simply for containing specific keywords commonly used in scientific research but also on the culture warrior no-no list.
- tt24 8mo agoIn what way does ChatGPT’s understanding of the term DEI not reflect reality?
- nancyminusone 8mo agoIn the sense that viewpoints of people that use the term DEI do not appear to reflect reality? What kind of sentiment do you think you would find in the training material regarding the term DEI?
- eesmith 8mo agoFrom the article: > For example, the AI searches [purportedly related to DEI] flagged .... a film examining how the game of baseball was “instrumental in healing wounds caused by World War I and the 1980s economic standoff between the US and Japan,” How at all is that DEI? (Surely that should be WWII, yes? The complaint also says "I".) And, is this also DEI? > another charting “the rise and reforms of the Native Americans boarding school systems in the U.S. between 1819 and 1934,” American football would be impoverished without the contributions of Native Americans from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an experimental Native American boarding school. Pratt, who founded the school, wrote "If all men are created equal, then why were blacks segregated in separate regiments and Indians segregated on separate tribal reservations? Why weren't all men given equal opportunities and allowed to assume their rightful place in society? Race became a meaningless abstraction in his mind." Is that also DEI? Would you care to summarize what DEI means in reality?
- stvltvs 8mo agoThe pejorative sense of DEI has probably poisoned the training data. You might be able to prompt around it, but the existing prompt is pretty lazy.
- fruitworks 8mo agothe dataset is poisoned with a definition you disagree with
- Capricorn2481 8mo agoNewsflash: the definition is amorphous to justify whatever people want.
- stvltvs 8mo agoAgreement or disagreement are irrelevant if you're asking the LLM for something more precise than generalized racial grievance labeled by the public as DEI.
- watwut 8mo agoWomen or minorities being there or being cared about is DEI. Only men naturally matter. White men I mean. Only right wing white men, actually, bonus point if they are aggressive assholes. That makes them proper masculine.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- davidguetta 8mo ago[flagged]
- hsbauauvhabzb 8mo ago[flagged]
- colinplamondon 8mo agoIronically... ChatGPT having such a positive attractor basin for DEI probably widened the net here tremendously.
- speak_plainly 8mo agoIt sounds like they stupidly did exactly what was stupidly expected.
- amelius 8mo agoThat's like calling it just incompetence where it clearly is both incompetence and malice.
- mindslight 8mo agoWe're going to look back at the second Grump admin as what happens when society enthusiastically embraces ego-stroking hallucinations - from "magic computer" LLMs, hollow TV personalities, and of course good old combative dementia.
- blibble 8mo agodef accept_grant(application): return random.choice([True, False])
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Hamuko 8mo agoIs this the classic model?
- gs17 8mo agoNo, that accepts far too many grants. You'd need to add weights=[1, 100] to it.
- layer8 8mo agoThe article is about grant termination, not the acceptance of applications.
- blibble 8mo agoturns out this function works just as well for that too
- Machado117 8mo agoonly 50% of the time
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 8mo agoI think I'd have to reject it in review. The parameter is not used and should therefore be prepended with an underscore or literally be named "_" to signal such to a reader.
- xg15 8mo ago> We’ve mentioned Cavanaugh here before, for the time when he was head of the US Institute for Peace, and Elon and DOGE falsely labeled a guy who had worked for USIP a member of the Taliban, causing the actual Taliban to kidnap the guy’s family. Sorry for the OT, but... what on earth?
- mc_maurer 8mo agoYeah the story linked there is absolutely nuts.
- derbOac 8mo agoMy guess is this will garner attention for use of AI — that's where my attention went as well initially. But there's another layer to this, which is whether a grant should be terminated just because it pertains to DEI, regardless of AI being involved or not. My guess is you couldn't get a roomful of experts to agree on what "DEI" means; I doubt AI could do better, and even if it could, I'm not sure I'd want that to be the determining factor about whether it would get funded. To the extent it was, I'm not sure it would be a bad thing.
- yks 8mo ago> My guess is you couldn't get a roomful of experts to agree on what "DEI" means let's not pretend that anyone involved cares one bit
- RangerScience 8mo agoI remember (the one time I snuck into NIPS) a buuunch of papers on "fairness", and it was basically: "We have decided that this input should not affect the outcome. Does it? If so, how?" So that seems like a pretty good actual "what's DEI?" - Does race/gender/sexuality/etc affect some outcome? Should it? If it does affect it and shouldn't, what we can we do about it? That said... yeah, not gonna get a room full of anyone to agree on that. Starting with that "should".
- tastyface 8mo ago[flagged]
- krapp 8mo ago>My guess is you couldn't get a roomful of experts to agree on what "DEI" means; You don't need to, it's clearly defined within existing legal frameworks. A lot of people including the current administration seem to believe it means "racism against white men," but those people are simply wrong.
- amelius 8mo ago> But there's another layer to this, which is whether a grant should be terminated just because it pertains to DEI, regardless of AI being involved or not. Another layer? I think it's the same level of stupidity/shadiness.
- hsbauauvhabzb 8mo agoI wonder what the economic cost of DOGE basing policy entirely on whether something is DEI or not. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
- spwa4 8mo agoThat's going to be another big problem with AI. The same problem they have with developers. Management: "We need to do X" AI does X Management: "It's not working" AI: what do you mean? It does exactly what you asked. Management: "I wanted it to do Y, and that's how you do it" (with Y having nothing to do with X whatsoever) AI: ... Management: I'm hiring the developers back ...
- hleszek 8mo agoThat has always been a thing since the invention of computers. The great thing about computers is that they do exactly what you ask them to do. The problem with computers is that they do exactly what you ask them to do.
- enlightens 8mo agofrom 1864: > On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#:~:text=226-,Passages%20from%20the%20Life%20of%20a%20Philosopher https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#:~:text=226-,P...
- layer8 8mo agoThe board will solve this by replacing management with AI.
- spwa4 8mo ago... and then accept the blame themselves? No they won't.
- drivingmenuts 8mo agoCan we please put these guys on trial for malfeasance?!??!?
- kjksf 8mo ago[flagged]
- butterbomb 8mo ago[flagged]
- Capricorn2481 8mo ago> Sure, right after Tim Waltz's trial for allowing billions of fraud And the source is a random youtube video from a troll and the whitehouse.gov blogspam. Real smoking gun.
- lawn 8mo agoMeanwhile Trump and his family is busy committing billions of fraud...
- kjksf 8mo agoI mean a business registered to an address taking millions from government to provide child care. The address is boarded up, no children. All on video and public records for evidence. What more do you want? But that's not all, of course. There were already successful prosecutions of fraudsters before the video made by the person you try so hard to discredit with 5-th grade tactic of throwing insults. What is ad hominem? Lots more people were already arrested and lots of investigation have started as a result. I lived in San Francisco, watching homeless problem becoming bigger and bigger. California spent billions supposedly fixing homelessness. Where did that money go? California speed rail was supposed to be done in 2020 for $33 billion. It's 2026. Newsom spent $15 billion and NOT A SINGLE TRACK is operational. Where did the money go? Who did the work and what were they doing for 18 years (it got approved in 2008). Fraud or gross incompetence? Either way, how is Newsom still in charge (and worse, running for President)? I could go on but I'll wait for your "rebuttal" how convicting someone of fraud isn't really an indication that fraud happened or spending $15 billion achieving nothing is totally how non-fraudulent construction project work.
- TZubiri 8mo agoFun technical note: >"Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. ”" GPT models generate tokens from left to right, they are causal. That prompt causes the model to lock in to an answer and then generate the explanation after the fact. This is why you can sometimes see the failure mode "The answer is X because the answer can't be X so the answer is Y" Asking for the Yes/No to be placed at the end would put the CoT before and generate 100% objectively better results. I used to think prompt engineering was a bullshit term like you don't need to be trained at all to use this thing. But apparently you need to a little bit. So if the idea alone that an application is fed into chatgpt isn't dumb enough, consider that they failed to even use chatgpt correctly, which apparently is a thing.
- viraptor 8mo agoIt matters less these days with the thinking models. They'll automatically inject some extra content before the answer for basically the same purpose. But if you're using something simpler with immediate responses - yeah, the order is important.
- xg15 8mo agoWere thinking models even already widely available when DOGE was doing its thing?
- mrits 8mo ago[flagged]
- rbartelme 8mo agoI wonder if the same thing happened with--or is happening at--NSF? I know researchers that did not get funding for quantitative ecology fellowships or grants. After back channeling with program managers, it seems that using "diversity"--as in the quantitative ecological measures, metrics, or derived functional values--may have flagged proposals to be rejected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeta_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeta_diversity
- duxup 8mo agoThe "lists" that were public of science grants identified as DEI absolutely indicated they were just doing a ctrl+f on diversity, women, race at times. Same went for removing people from government websites and so on.
- fhdkweig 8mo agoCan never forget the Enola "Gay" https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/10/dei-enola-gay-wwii/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/10/dei-enola-gay-wwii/
- Mr_Eri_Atlov 8mo agoI hate it here
- aaroninsf 8mo agowhy have I not seen the butterfly meme yet
- anomie31 8mo agoWhy is this flagged?
- tencentshill 8mo agoThey would prefer if you stop asking that question
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]