They do apply, also for NIH funded research. I work in healthcare research and all the investigators I know have had to go to great lengths to whitewash their grant proposals (you can’t use the word “gender” for example, you must say “difference” instead of “disparity”, etc etc…)
It’s absolutely bonkers. However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.
> However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.
It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway. I don't mean this negatively: they're broad but still subject matter experts, parachuting in new people would be administrative malpractice, and they know just as much what conclusions can and can't be drawn from an analysis plan.
> It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway.
Historically, yes; as well as firing leadership and moving decisions usually made further down the chain up to the new leadership, this administration has also fired a lot of the existing grant reviewers in most of the big health an science grant-issuing agencies (and probably smaller ones, too, but those would have made fewer headlines) as part of the political purges of, well, a lot of the federal civil service earlier this year.
Its not fraud. The grant proposal accurately describes the research occurring, and people evaluating the grant will have no misconception about what they are funding. The problem is that political appointees have been applying dumb keyword searches which block research that has nothing to do with the issues they object to. Like using privilege in the computer security sense. Or bias in the statistical sense, unrelated to political leaning.
Take a look at the comments left by that profile. I don’t think that they would be able to understand what you are saying here, all they see is red.
A partial recent comment “qcnguy” made: “DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Requiring the PSF to dump DEI if they want the money is good for everyone, because DEI is bad for people”
It's worth pointing out that this profile has been around for three months and already has enough karma to have access to the "flag" and "vouch" tools.
It's also worth pointing out that despite this thread being full of ridiculously low quality posts, I haven't flagged any of them. That's the sort of thing DEI leftists do, not everyone.
It doesn't matter if you have used them in this thread or not. An account of your age and your disposition should not have access to automated moderation tools, period.
Moderation via easily gamified populism is the worst kind of moderation.
Because the leftists flagging and downvoting everything they disagree with in this thread are clearly exemplars of excellent user moderation? Knock it off.
This is a contradiction. There's no such thing, only shades of bad, and HN has about the worst possible implementation.
For what it's worth, I didn't flag or downvote you. YC is seemingly fine with your behavior, and I've seen much worse out of people who have been here longer. I'd rather your mask-off rants be out in the open than swept under the rug.
> The entire point is to create misconceptions in the people evaluating the grant. That is grant fraud.
No and no. It was just explicitly and intricately explained to you how that's not true, and you didn't even engage with the explanation.
The censors are filtering words not on the meaning of the words but based on the existence of other meanings of words. It's blatantly horrific behavior, in violation of any basic code of ethics or morals.
No fraud is being described in these comments by the grant applicants. However, among those trying to perpetrate political correctness on the a non-political process, unethical behavior abounds.
> Undoubtably their searches have also been finding lots of research that is related to what they object to. You can't use the existence of mistakes to claim that deceiving the government therefore isn't fraud. That's not how the law works.
First, having political objections to some types of research and imposing that sort of political filter is highly unethical in these scientific positions. Second, because they sometimes execute this political censorship successfully does not justify the inaccurate political censorship.
Nobody supporting anything like this has a leg to stand on about laws or legality or anything relating to the rule of law. The Trump administration is acting completely lawlessly, ignores court orders, and has zero regard for the constitution.
I don't recall the government making hugely significant financial decisions about science funding on those grounds, any more than people "falling over themselves" to shave two characters off the default branch name. Nor do I remember DEI being quite as harmful to the humans as master/slave relations in the US. But, it is completely in line with these sorts of politicians and their supporters to criticize people for something, and then act 10x as bad.
I didn't engage with the explanation because nobody has provided one. This whole thread is just people asserting that it's OK to change a few words and continue doing what they were previously doing, because Trump. There's no deeper logic and that's not an intricate explanation. It is, in fact, fraud.
Nobody here is actually confused about any of this. You're all defending fraud because you hate the victims of it, not out of any intellectual principle. The government doesn't want to fund certain kinds of work. People who want to grab money for that work anyway are manipulating the language they use whilst refusing to change what they're really doing. That is grant fraud. Merely asserting it's not over and over will not help you when lawsuits start flying.
That's academics. The PSF, despite how awful this blog post makes it look, is at least doing what it's supposed to be doing: taking the requirements seriously and refusing the money.
> First, having political objections to some types of research and imposing that sort of political filter is highly unethical in these scientific positions
Python hacking isn't science! But if you want to talk about academic research instead, the time for academics to make this argument was 50 years ago. Nobody is going to buy the idea it's unacceptable to be political from academics of all people. There is no group more blatantly political: if it's unethical to impose "political filters" on "scientific positions" then academia needs to engage in massive purges of itself because it's overrun with unethical behavior.
> The Trump administration is acting completely lawlessly, ignores court orders, and has zero regard for the constitution.
It and its congressional allies literally makes the law, there is nothing in the constitution requiring the government to fund DEI and it is doing so because it won an election in which it said it'd do all these things. It's academia that's acting lawlessly, ignoring direct orders from its funding sources and has zero regard for the constitution - which puts the executive and Congress in charge of grant funding, not grantees or the PSF.
That's definitely not the requirement! The requirement is to avoid doing certain kinds of "research" that the government disagrees is valid research to fund, characterized by the principles underlying it.
They may have started by using certain keywords to find examples of such grants to terminate, but the requirement itself has nothing to do with words and everything to do with the intentions.
The “requirements” are vague and still being litigated against congressional intent, but the problem is the scale: when you have so many complex things to review and only a few trusted political apparatchiks, they end up doing things like simple keyword searches for terms like “diversity” and “inclusion” blithely aware of those being used in fields such as geology.
I know this because I know people who’ve had to take time away from their research to keep their grants from being cancelled.
And maybe they'll get that back eventually, but academia can't complain about rough handling when it steadfastly refused as a bloc to fix its own ways for so long. Outsiders trying to fix them will always create a lot more collateral damage than insiders fixing the problems, but when insiders refuse, outsiders will take over.
Also, frankly, I heard a bunch of such stories and very often the grantees were misrepresenting their work. It actually did have DEI content in it and they were pretending it didn't. You can see how many people in this thread are arguing that all you have to do to comply with the requirements are use a thesaurus or misrepresent their work and then continue anyway. For as long as academics insist on total warfare and malicious compliance, expect universities to be blowtorched.
this and many other grants were singled out because of words used in their description. you seem quite certain that 'diversity' here isn't referring to the degree to which the genome of these animals is similar to different to other of their species, but instead a leftist dogwhistle hiding racist intent, and this researcher lost their position because they are really a secret racist and deserves to be 'blowtorched'.
you celebrate the ruin of the career of a highly trained person, frankly a national resource, because they used a word to describe their work that you think has evil connotations.
I should have been clear that it’s particularly with respect to word choice. All of the research we’re doing is accurately described by the proposal. It’s just codified in this weird new way of speaking where you can’t say certain trigger words which offend the snowflakes up top.
For me personally, I really don’t care if it’s grant fraud or not. We’re doing research into how to improve the healthcare and quality of life of less privileged groups. Our work is about helping people, full stop. It’s one of the best ways I could ever want my tax money being spent.
Right, academics think they're above the law and that it's OK to lie to conservatives to advance their agendas. So why should anyone believe you, when you say it's all above board? If you don't care about engaging in financial fraud you don't care about misrepresenting things on Hacker News either, for sure.
The culture of dishonesty and extremism in academia is why it will eventually be liquidated. Expect to see academic funding driven to zero and university property seized in future. There will be no more academics. It'll take years, but mass lawlessness of that kind won't be tolerated forever.
It’s absolutely bonkers. However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.