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The academy allowed itself to be hollowed out and started playing politics instead of searching for truth. Yes, hard sciences included.
No, just wanting to keep your head down and “do the science” is not an excuse. I’m sorry for you personally, but academia made its bed and now it will have to lie in it.
The extent of most researchers in the hard sciences' capitulation to progressive ideology is that they filled out the mandatory "broader impacts" portion of a grant application and made up some shit they didn't believe about how whatever they're doing will incidentally improve the lives of women or minorities. It would have been simple enough to remove this requirement from all future applications and most scientists would have been thankful to whichever administration did that. Anyone who had ever been involved with the grant writing process could have told them this.
Denouncing every recipient of such a grant for doing what was required of them to obtain one is akin to punishing everyone in the Soviet Union ex post facto who praised the communist party to keep their job, needlessly making enemies of people who would otherwise be on your side. Should they have had the courage to stand up for their convictions despite the threat of censure or worse? Perhaps, but people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. How many of us here fought the advance of wokeness tooth and nail in every aspect of our professional and public lives, and took all the hits that that entailed? I doubt very many, and this is a place bursting at the seams with reflexive contrarians.
Why should I believe they didn't believe it? The gatekeepers of the hard sciences were all too ready to expel Tim Hunt (and of course James Watson) from their ranks for violation of that "shit". They were happy to put Alessandro Strumia on the shit-list for opposing it. (and not hard science, but they censured Peter Boghossian for "unauthorized human experimentation" for submitting bogus articles to a woke journal). All public polls say they're strongly aligned with the left on this.
All this is, is taking away the grants which include the praise of Stalin. No one is even being blacklisted.
Perhaps not "tooth and nail", but I fought my battles and took my hits. I certainly never endorsed woke views.
If that were all that it was, we would be in a good place. I think a majority of hard sciencers would be completely fine with that. Maybe some small set of gatekeepers at some set of institutions would be unhappy, but kinda who cares? But yeah, that's not all that it is.
No, they wouldn't. Because the majority of them are not even Kolmogrovs, collaborating but not really believing. Most of them are believers. When they were told to add diversity and inclusion to proposals, yes sir. When Trump I appeared #resistance.
The particular thing starting this thread is complaining about impacts to an internship program designed to discriminate against white and Asian men.
I'm going to shamelessly pull the "computer science isn't hard science" card and claim that you probably don't have actual knowledge of this.
That's still not all that it is.
Computer science is mathematics, but its practical applications are very close to the theory, and that has saved it from some of the more embarrassing effects of political capture; there's only so far you can push BS, if it doesn't cash out in working code it won't be respected. That doesn't stop a lot of computer scientists from being true believers and inventing (I don't say corrupting, because that would imply there was a time they were legitimate) whole subfields like "AI safety" which are political.
As for hard science, not only have we seen hard scientists discipline their own for opposing the left, even when the right was titularly in charge, we have not seen some upswelling of support or even relief. No "thank goodness, President Trump is taking away these bullshit diversity requirements which have been weighing on us". We haven't even seen grumbling of the sort "Oh shit, now the new boss is in town and we're going to have to rewrite the proposals to butter him up instead of the other guy". Instead it's "Oh, no, science will end because we're going to lose internship programs for women and non-white-and-Asian males!" And of course there's all those polls of academia showing an extreme left bias, and other polls saying they wouldn't hire conservatives, and that sort of thing.
I disagree with this - CS is very captured. The close connection between theory and practice might have kept the practice of the discipline close to reality, but the culture has been completely taken over, probably because by its nature, it is so much more "online" than other disciplines. I would speculate that it is probably the most LGBT-friendly discipline on account of its feed-in cohort being primarily online weirdos, support for transgenderism going back to when the graybeards were young, etc. I'd metaphorically bet on it having the highest raw numbers of trans people too (see e.g., the Rust community survey.) The industrial side has also been taken over - see all the codes of conduct, the big tech companies at the forefront of DEI pushes, etc.
This is a discipline that has the ability to cross-cut everything ("software is eating the world") and possibly even invent superintelligence. If you do not share its values, the fact that it is so thoroughly converged is not a happy one.
Yes, I didn't say it wasn't. I said it was saved from some of the effects of capture. No one is putting forth papers of postmodern critical theory and claiming it's computer science. Well, almost nobody.
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