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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.
Not the way most of your ilk view it. It's about information, use/transfer thereof. They claim to be in charge of information, so of course, they're extremely susceptible to politics. Basically every part of it. Even the politics that you like (the libertarian-bent crypto folks, for example). It's all politics, through and through. Not so with the hard sciences.
I was all sorts of ready for relief, until approximately day one of when that relief was supposed to come, and instead, all and any hard science was suddenly on the chopping block. "Cut it all, indiscriminately," I keep hearing over and over again. I would have loved to have some relief. I would have loved to cheer on the clean-up of any problems. I was genuinely excited. But those hopes were swiftly crushed. We got chemotherapy instead. I don't know how much you know about chemotherapy, but ya don't actually feel relief when you get the first dose. Like, maybe it'll work in the long run; I don't actually know yet. But it would be pretty dumb to unilaterally decide that someone needed chemo, force the drugs into them, then turn around and say that you're actually justified in just killing them entirely because they're not showing relief yet.
I don't think you know who my "ilk" is.
If you mean things like the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, yes, those are political. In as much as they are political, they are not computer science. And as far as I know their proponents do not claim they are.
I'm hearing these claims that they are cutting all hard science indiscriminately. But then the actual examples turn out to be that they're cutting "science with a DEI twist". The few cases where "diversity" refers to something other than DEI-style diversity are clear errors, but people are objecting to things that aren't that. Instead, there's circling of wagons around programs because "well there really wasn't THAT MUCH DEI". If the US is to fund telescopes in Chile, that money needs to go to telescopes in Chile. Not 50% telescopes in Chile and 50% outreach programs to Hispanic science students. Not 75% telescopes and 25% Hispanic outreach. And not 99% telescopes and 1% Hispanic outreach.
Nor do you know who the hard sciencers are.
Way beyond that. Let's go with an analogy. Instead of it being the UK gov't coming in and telling Apple that they've gotta shut down ADP, suppose that was one of the Trump administration's first moves. (It might still happen!) They've gotta get at those horrible wokies who are now using encryption to #resist against the true and proper administration. They just start slashing out at everything. Signal, Telegram, etc. It's all gotta go. Are you going to be first in line to celebrate... or at least show some relief? Glad that the President is taking the chemotherapy approach, so his FBI can go after all the wokies tryna hide their nefarious #resistance?
I haven't looked at that grant, but I'm pretty confident that the vastly most probable reality is that it did exactly that. Again, look, I'm on board with taking away stupid throwaway sentences; I'm on board with way way way more than that! I'd be perfectly happy with what I mentioned in my previously-linked comment; you could conditional all federal funding on them not discriminating on the basis of race/gender... at the institutional level. This would be a huge huge thing, and it would hit everything that universities do, not even just what they put as a throwaway sentence in a grant application. This would actually be focused on the problem. Not just stopping everything, slashing all the funding agencies indiscriminately, and giving the chemo treatment. The prevailing opinion here is that it should all just be shut down, because "universities bad". And, frankly, I am super sympathetic, because there is so much of the universities that I hate. Not even just the wokeness; I complain about their gov't-enforced perfect price discrimination and their stranglehold on accreditation/certification and more. I would love to have so many things change in the intersection between gov't/academia. But, "We can't tell what's good
encrypted communicationresearch and badencrypted communicationresearch, so maybe we just shouldn't have anyencrypted communicationresearch," is not the way, in my opinion.I'd oppose that because I oppose the position of banning difficult-to-crack encryption for government convenience; that is, I would oppose the Trump administration's political goals. I do think that's a lot of what's going on with the objections to the science stuff -- the people involved want to keep the no-white-or-Asian males intern programs and the Hispanic outreach and all that.
It's 'chemo treatment', but it's not indiscriminate. It just looks that way because there's so much cancer. The top level post here is about NSFs "research experiences for undergraduates", which is one of those programs that encourages discriminating against white and Asian males.
Even to get at the wokies?! I oppose ridding ourselves of all research, even to get at the wokies.
Please speak to me as a person.
From what I've heard through the grapevine from people at funding agencies, it's absolutely wild right now. And people here are literally calling for it to be indiscriminate. If you disagree with them, then you agree with me.
Yes, I would oppose banning difficult-to-crack encryption even if that made it harder to get at the wokies. But if someone proposed an encryption system that somehow deliberately produced a satoshi a year for woke causes, I'd sure oppose that.
I'm not speaking about you alone. Nor, are you, I think, speaking about me alone when you say things like "people here are literally calling for it to be indiscriminate".
But they'd probably act that way if $1 was being cut, or they weren't getting an accustomed-to increase.
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