As a scientist who writes NSF grants, I think the stuff that you’re labeling woke here makes up a very small percentage of the total money that actually gets spent in grants like these. Labeling that grant as woke because it puts like 2% of its total funds towards a K-12 outreach program seems like a mistake to me. (And in an armchair-philosophy way, yes the scientists could in principle just resubmit the grants without the last part—but in practice nothing works like this. Much more likely is that labeling these as “woke” leads people, like the current administration, to try to drastically reduce the overall funding that goes to NSF, with a strong net negative effect on basic science research.)
“Labeling that grant as woke because it puts like 2% of its total funds towards a K-12 outreach program seems like a mistake to me.”
It’s a mistake if it’s meant to show the grant is bad, and I suspect that Larks has political views that I would very strongly disagree with, but I think it does successfully make the narrow point that the data about NSF grants does not show that an AI designed to identify pro-woke or pro-Hamas language will be bad at doing so.
FWIW the point that I was trying to make (however badly) was that the government clearly behaved in a way that had little regard for accuracy, and I don’t see incentives for them to behave any differently here
It seems pretty appropriate and analogous to me—the administration wants to ensure 100% of science grants go to science, not 98%, and similarly they want to ensure that 0% of foreign students support Hamas, not 2%. Scott’s data suggests that have done a reasonably good job with the former at identifying 2%-woke grants, and likewise if they identify someone who spends 2% of their time supporting Hamas they would consider this a win.
I don’t think the issue here is actually about whether all science grants should go only to actual scientific work. Suppose that a small amount of the grant had been spent on getting children interested in science in a completely non-woke way that had nothing to do with race or gender. I highly doubt that either the administration or you regard that as automatically and obviously horrendously inappropriate. The objection is to stuff targeted at women and minorities in particular, not to a non-zero amount of science spending being used to get kids interested in science. Describing it as just being about spending science grants only on science is just a disingenuous way of making the admin’s position sound more commonsense and apolitical than it actually is.
As a scientist who writes NSF grants, I think the stuff that you’re labeling woke here makes up a very small percentage of the total money that actually gets spent in grants like these. Labeling that grant as woke because it puts like 2% of its total funds towards a K-12 outreach program seems like a mistake to me. (And in an armchair-philosophy way, yes the scientists could in principle just resubmit the grants without the last part—but in practice nothing works like this. Much more likely is that labeling these as “woke” leads people, like the current administration, to try to drastically reduce the overall funding that goes to NSF, with a strong net negative effect on basic science research.)
“Labeling that grant as woke because it puts like 2% of its total funds towards a K-12 outreach program seems like a mistake to me.”
It’s a mistake if it’s meant to show the grant is bad, and I suspect that Larks has political views that I would very strongly disagree with, but I think it does successfully make the narrow point that the data about NSF grants does not show that an AI designed to identify pro-woke or pro-Hamas language will be bad at doing so.
FWIW the point that I was trying to make (however badly) was that the government clearly behaved in a way that had little regard for accuracy, and I don’t see incentives for them to behave any differently here
Yeah, I agree with the more general point.
It seems pretty appropriate and analogous to me—the administration wants to ensure 100% of science grants go to science, not 98%, and similarly they want to ensure that 0% of foreign students support Hamas, not 2%. Scott’s data suggests that have done a reasonably good job with the former at identifying 2%-woke grants, and likewise if they identify someone who spends 2% of their time supporting Hamas they would consider this a win.
I don’t think the issue here is actually about whether all science grants should go only to actual scientific work. Suppose that a small amount of the grant had been spent on getting children interested in science in a completely non-woke way that had nothing to do with race or gender. I highly doubt that either the administration or you regard that as automatically and obviously horrendously inappropriate. The objection is to stuff targeted at women and minorities in particular, not to a non-zero amount of science spending being used to get kids interested in science. Describing it as just being about spending science grants only on science is just a disingenuous way of making the admin’s position sound more commonsense and apolitical than it actually is.