A committee of the US Senate scanned all the grants doled out by the National Science Foundation over about three years, and discovered (with my emphasis) “3,483 grants, more than ten percent of all NSF grants and totaling over $2.05 billion in federal dollars, went to questionable projects that promoted diversity, [inclusion, and equity (DIE)] tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle.” (Thanks to Thanatos Savehn for the tip; link to the report.)
Science is determined to DIE. We look at the consequences of this at the end.
There was some overlap in classifying the kind of DIEing, but over 3,000 of the grants, for some \$1.9 billion, went to increase the Status of Official Victims: “The Committee defined Status as grants that described persons based on their membership in a population deemed underrepresented, underserved, socioeconomically disadvantaged, or excluded.”
Would it help to point out shoveling money to people because they are of a specific race is illegal? No, it would not. Because the law is what the law does, so suck it up, white men. And because “Beginning in 2021, the White House and NSF created scientific integrity policies to require that agencies “[i]ncorporate [Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Accessibility] considerations into all aspects of science planning, execution, and communication.”
About a third of the DIE grants went to women because they were women. The Committee didn’t say what these women’s feelings were about this, but it’s a good bet the papers they write funded by this largess will fill us in in great detail.
The other grants went to the categories of Social Justice, a.k.a. Grievance Hustling, Race, and Environmental Justice, which surprisingly (to me, anyway) only scooped up 362 grants. Could interest in “climate change” for persons of color be waning?
It’s worse than the raw numbers say, because the amounts going to DIE are increasing year by year, with most of it coming in 2023, and 2024 looking like it will be a banner year. A full 16.5\% of all NSF grants in 2022 were for DIEing, almost 19\% in 2023, and it’s projected to be about 27\% this year.
Over a quarter of “hard” science money is now going to DIE. It turns out to be more than enough.
If, as now seems increasingly likely, The Cackler flames out and the left can’t muster the will to fortify the election sufficiently, that 27\% will likely be the apex of DIE funding. Though given how independently the managerial state, i.e. the Expertocracy, operates from formal governance, it’s likely that some amount would still flow to DIE even if The Fascist Dictator-On-Day-One retakes office.
Consider that because most of the NSF’s money goes to academia, and academia is determined to DIE in ways unconsidered by NSF, all of this increases the likelihood that the best science will be that which comes from outside the government.
More evidence comes from this post (and subscribe!) by our friend John Carter, the very Martian Warlord himself: “Academia is women’s work“. All that money spent to DIE has its effect. Women now dominate almost all university departments, with the exceptions, so far, of Engineering and Computer Science. For the obvious reasons. But, as Carter says, these fields cannot remain untouched:
Sadly for the prospects of academia, there is almost no prospect of universities letting well enough be. The persistence of a few small pockets of patriarchy in the midst of the gynocratic hegemony is an affront to everything the longhouse stands for. We endlessly hear about the crisis of female underrepresentation in those departments that have not yet been conquered, principally STEM. There are special recruitment programs for women, special scholarships for women, special mentoring programs for women. STEM departments are under constant internal and external pressure to bring in more women. This has led to a culture inside STEM departments that shows immense favouritism to women…
University faculties and administrations are packed full of activist girlbosses for whom admitting, mentoring, hiring, and promoting other activist girlbosses is their entire animating purpose in life.
Where are engineering and computer science doing well in real life? Not the academy. Didn’t we this week see the marvel of a rocket blasting to earth? And aren’t the better parts of AI (modeling) all in the hands of private companies?
Companies are hampered, though. Minute they touch any grant money, they allow oversight by government DIE masters. Plus there are all the civil “rights” laws which insist every aspect of life DIE. Imagine creating a company position called “Our Most Awesome Engineers”. It will, if left alone, be filled with mostly white and Asian men. That’s when the “disparate impact” lawsuit hits, and the department must legally DIE.
Still, if you can keep quiet, and hire Victims in proportional numbers and give them busywork, a sad but necessary expense, good work can be done. And is being done.
Maybe even better are private foundations. Not extant think tanks. They are almost all captured, and few are science focused (as opposed to “science education”). Small groups dedicated toward singular tasks can accomplish wonders.
Do not forget science got its start among men — many of whom were priests or in religious orders! Not groups of men: just men. Some were independently wealthy, some had patrons. It will probably take individuals working on their own to restore the broken foundations, the metaphysics on which all physics must build, before science can again become a group activity and be great again.
Though be careful giving that theory too much weight, since as I find myself in the situation of being out on my own, I may be glamorizing it overmuch.
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When i was in college, we didn’t have a single female in the college of engineering. They were all in the teacher education college.
“Minute they touch any grant money, they allow oversight by government DIE masters.” Holds for both industry AND academia. Send your scholarship money somewhere like Hillsdale, which accepts ZERO Federal funding.
This is an area where the Muslims know something we don’t…
Here’s a bit from telearb.net/node/23 on “4.2 Malthusian Belief and Major Leftist Policy Positions”
Key line: “if you want to believe, and your belief predicts scarcity, you will find ways to see science and engineering as the enemy.”
–
Anti-Science
A more subtle question arises as a corollary: why is the political left so deeply anti-science? Among the first actions taken by Carter, Clinton, and Obama were cuts to NASA, cuts to military R&D, cuts to DOE and other departmentally funded science work, and the redirection of congressionally committed national science foundation and related federally controlled grant budgets away from science and engineering and to things like Women’s Studies, Urban Studies, and research in education.
Carter, incidently, mothballed promising DOE research and development work on hydraulic fracturing; while NASA, which under President Bush obtained financing for and launched the Pluto, Ceres, Solar, and telescopic exploration projects making recent science headlines, managed, eight years after the 2006/7 Pelosi budget, to meet the Obama administration mandate on Muslim outreach by hiring several hundred new Mohammads.
In a recent discussion with a devout progressive who stayed civil until nearly the end, I was informed with absolute sincerity that Obama et al tried to kill the space program while redirecting science funding to arts faculties and community colleges because republicans want to cut taxes – and pointing out that the Trump administration has been working to restore funding while cutting taxes caused her to abandon all pretense to civility.
The real reason is that science is the enemy of delusion, engineering the enemy of scarcity.
Why isn’t the world population limited to a few million chosen living lives of peace, harmony, and self-fulfillment in glorious syncronicity with nature? Because it’s an absurd vision – someone has to clean the toilets, grow the food, and make the entertainment. The Seinfeld universe, like Jane Austen’s, is free of both science and servants, but the real one depends on science to advance, on engineering to make things work, and on Adam Smith’s invisible hand to motivate those turning ideas into realities.
Basically, if you want to believe, and your belief predicts scarcity, you will find ways to see science and engineering as the enemy.
A minor reason is that the ignorant, like the dead, vote left: the less the person knows about how the world works, the more likely they are to support liberal/progressive causes – and it doesn’t matter whether that lack of knowledge is reflected in a Ph’d in basket weaving or the illiteracy of the gang banger: neither has a clue, and both generally vote democrat.
A male friend of mine was a college student back in the mid 1970s (go Gators!) and enrolled in an early course on feminism. His female professor explained to the class that the reason why NASA built rockets shaped like long, pointed, cylinders was that the engineers were men and they were expressing the patriarchy. My friend tried explaining the concepts of air resistance, staging, and mass to thrust, but his teacher was having none of THAT stuff! After class as he was walking to his room, another student, a young girl with hairy armpits, stopped him and threatened his life while waving a butcher knife at him. “Try that crap again and I’ll cut your throat!”
True Nolan: I’m trying to imagine how a rocket shaped like a vulva would work.
In college in the early ’90s I was forced to take a class called “Perspectives on Gender”. The lesbian professor was batshit crazy. Even the women in the class would roll their eyes at her looney lectures. Among many other gems of knowledge, I learned that all men are rapists; those of us who haven’t raped just haven’t had the opportunity yet. Absolutely nobody took the class seriously.
Mr. Murphy points out that the Left is anti-science. That may be true on some levels, but the Left is definitely pro scientism, a perversion of science, the belief that “science” is the best or only way to find Truth.
Scientism is profoundly atheistic, as in “scientific communism”, empiricism, and existentialism. Whatever men (or women) choose to believe is true under scientism (i.e. a man may be a woman by choice, not birth “assignment”). Innate knowledge and natural reason do not conflict with faith, they underpin it. Hence scientism, and the Left, oppose both. Our Age of Unreason is a deep cancer of the soul, not merely of science and engineering.
The best engineering and science might be coming from private companies, but the left has come up with a new way to stifle them. The California Coastal Commission, supposedly concerned with the environment, has just banned Elon Musk from launching rockets from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the central California coast. Environmental impacts should be moot as far as Vandenberg is concerned, seeing as how rockets have already been taking off from there for at least sixty years, but the bureaucrats responsible for the decision seem to be troubled about something else. They’re all on video explaining how they’re doing this because they don’t like Musk’s politics and his association with Trump. Last I heard, Musk is planning to sue.
Another notable passage from Carter:
“There are salient intellectual differences between the sexes beyond the issue of raw cognitive horsepower. Men are comfortable with, no, they delight in heated arguments, passionately debating the merits and flaws of various ideas, raising doubts as to the veracity of evidence, poking holes in one another’s assertions, and generally questioning the quality of each other’s work. They don’t mind getting in fights, and indeed, often enjoy them. Academic rivalries have been infamously vituperative since the peripatetics were walking circles around the Platonists. A scholar stands out by standing up to the others in his field and surviving their most ruthless assaults. The result of this adversarial approach to the development of ideas is that ideas become stronger over time. The bullshit gets weeded out. It’s also just fun to watch, like an autistic cage fight.
If you attack a woman’s scholarly work head on, she has a tendency to cry. No one likes to see women cry, so as women’s presence in academia has increased, academics have become noticeably more conflict-averse and soft-spoken.
At the same time, women tend to prize consensus, and to ruthlessly punish those who violate it. The feminized academy is notable mainly for its single-minded conformity to an increasingly tangled bird’s nest of red lines that may not be crossed. What matters is no longer what is true, but ‘being a good person’. The female-dominated academy is therefore wholly incapable of generating new ideas, because new ideas hurt peoples’ feelings, and its primary imperative is maintaining internal social consensus. It is not properly speaking a university at all, but a convent for nurturing the involutionary spirals of Nth-wave feminism.
All of this makes the female-dominated academy, and this is perhaps its primary sin, exceptionally boring.
Academia is, at root, a luxury service.
A luxury service cannot afford to be boring.”
This should make your day Sgt. Briggs. Harvard Business School professor and “ honesty researcher” Francesca Gino has been accused of plagiarizing significant sections of her two tomes. The books, no doubt, deal with how to get ahead without really trying.
People have been talking about the “problem” of underrepresentation of women in STEM for so long that we know exactly what the issue is. The vast majority of women simply do not like working in STEM. There are so many incentives for women to get involved in these programs that they are well represented in lower level courses. But the number who become serious researchers in technical fields is the same as it ever was. Generally they will transfer out to things that they are more interested in, like nursing programs, high school teaching, or even in fields like sociology where they will then rail about the injustice of women not being in the same STEM fields that they themselves abandoned.
If women at large had an interest in being mathematicians, theoretical physicists, computer engineers, etc. we would have long ago seen the field become more even in terms of gender ratios. But they don’t, so it hasn’t.
The only way to change the situation is to redefine what STEM means. If we said that occupations like Nurse or Dental Hygienist were “STEM careers” that by itself would do wonders to the ratios. Similarly if we put “web designer” at the top of the list for “prestigious computer science programs” we could get more women involved, especially if we went all in and focused only on the graphic design aspects and not stuff like cybersecurity, making sure that the database you are querying is set up properly, etc. This is part of why you see classes like “Calculus and Sustainability” or “Mathematics and Social Justice” pushed; the more non-math that you put into these courses the more that you can get people who don’t like math to take them while pretending that you are still training mathematicians. (Though this one is not entirely to blame on women; there are also obvious indoctrination motivations, and these courses are also a good way to increase pass rates for mathematics Gen Ed requirements without dealing with the fact that most freshmen college students are woefully unprepared even to do simple calculations or the most basic of reasoning.)