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thus begins the end of pax americana; you can't have a space-age economy if you don't have science.
Isn't "Space Age" derogatory at this point? That's how I use it: to mean something that is obsolete.
I haven't heard it be used like that before. It definitely has a positive association in my mind.
You should consider whether you might in fact be old!
Also... if you stop trading with everyone else.
One of the USA's main power sources is controlling the world reserve currency. This means that every other country imports inflation from the USA, in exchange for delivering vast quantities of useful goods and services to the USA. Without this special status, the USA will have to export as much as it imports.
"Controlling the world reserve currency" and "Having a massive trade deficit" are the same word, since trade deficit is how much stuff other countries sent you without you having to send stuff to them, which is how much currency you sent to those countries. Trump says he wants to eliminate the trade deficit.
RIP statisticians and Ml researchers who use the word “bias” in their work.
RIP Academia as a whole
In 2055, anti-wokeists will have banned "bias," and wokeists will have banned "weight." Following defeat in the pan-Eastern bent ground war, hawks will ban "loss." They will be renamed plusses, and double plusses, and ungood.
good. /s
"historically" is on this list
I think that relates to talking about history in a way that may make white people feel bad about it: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/01/florida-sb-148-racis...
Are you trying to justify or explain?
I don't support this action by Trump and I am linking to an article that criticizes the Florida bill. But it is trying to explain/justify why this word may be banned based referencing the ideological background that is motivating it.
List of words includes: female, females, and women. Does not include words like: male, males,and men.
Party of free speech that wants to protect women according to their supporters.
Freedom of speech does not imply freedom of funding.
The first amendment is specifically about preventing government reprisals for speech. If I would have won a federal grant, but was denied it because I said "trans rights," that's the definition of a first amendment violation.
You're wrong in this case. All you have to do is replace the target and it becomes obvious.
If a scientist currently or previously spammed papers of the form "why Nazis were right all along", we should all hope the government doesn't fund that subject or person.
The mass retraction of previously published papers is ethically concerning, but choice of who/what to fund in future is always completely in-scope for leadership to choose, regardless of whether you agree with the particular decision.
You're too gullible if you think these purity tests aren't going to be applied outside of the grant applications themselves. This is clearly an attempt to isolate out "woke" scientists and researchers, irrespective of what they're researching.
Gullibility has nothing to do with the logical question of "is this a free speech concern or not, and if it is is it in the subset covered by the Constitution?"
You can't oppose chaos while giving up on rigor yourself.
unless it is for right wing political campaigns! then it is all good, per Citizens United
I am so disheartened by the term "free speech" in political usage because it does seem to me mostly a rallying call to actually ban speech that the user of the term dislikes. I look to how "cisgender" is treated on X worse that most actual ethnic slurs: https://www.fastcompany.com/91126082/elon-musk-x-cisgender-c...
Very few actually want to apply it equally to both their side and the opposing side.
I did notice this one group called FIRE that actually does a pretty decent job of applying free speech rights relatively equally, I think we should support it more:
https://www.thefire.org
I’m curious what will happen to FIRE over the next few years. Presumably a lot of their funding over the past few years has come from right leaning sources and presumably they’re going to have to change their tack with the new folks in power.
FIRE has been around for decades and has dutifully resisted acquiring a partisan valence
Unfortunately a number of the legal minds behind these terrible laws are former FIRE alum, it was a real bummer when I saw multiple resumes with stints at FIRE.
Can I see a source for “forbidden” or “banned”? I see the author claiming these words get “flagged”, but also no source other than his post.
Surely HN users wouldn’t be so quick to just believe a random mastadon post because it aligns with their own <flagged words>, right?
Details here in Science: https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-nsf-starts...
In particle physics we usually use these terms which will be at any proposal. This is an interesting textbook definition of false positives when you have list that is using too common words.
- Minimum "Biased" data
- "Discrimination" or "Discriminatory" variables
- Phase space "excluded"
- "Inclusion" of data/variable/anything
- "inequality" -> wow bell's inequality and all this theory work about inequalities will be triggered
These are just example that came into my mind from quick thought and skimming. I'm pretty sure that this will have much worst false positive rate. I would really be surprised if the vast majority if not all of projects get flagged. I'm also sure that 100% of statistics work or project heavily reliant on statistics (probably everything else too) will be flagged.
Also "polarization".
Does that fall under global warming denial?
I mean, look, these aren’t clever people.
Anybody have the actual source of the list? It purports to be from a program officer, but how do we know?
Science article on it: https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-nsf-starts...
“Female” is taboo, but “male” is not. Um… yikes.
Molly White posted something yesterday: “you have a lot more in common with the ‘other people’ than you have with the people in power.” https://fosstodon.org/@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io/1139421522542...
Molly White is a good egg
for a group of people who wants to get politics out of science, they sure just injected a bunch of politics into science.
MAGA is a death cult.
Why did this just plummet to page three? Very weird.
[Edit] A few seconds later, I cannot find it no matter how many times I click "more".
because the comment section is going to be a shitshow, just like the Trump administration.
It was "flagged" by users.
People are getting into upvote/downvote wars over comments on the post. When that happens, the HN algorithm automatically downranks the post as likely to drive bad behavior among users.
Some users would like to ban the article that discusses the ban since it contains comments that they don't like about said ban.
Standard HN procedure, some people flag it that way when it's unflagged gets lost in 2nd page or behinde. It happens with other "divisive" or "delicate" subjects too.
What I find most disappointing and frustrating is that accessibility has gotten caught in the crosshairs of this anti-DEI crusade. I expect this will lead to a lot of suffering among the most vulnerable groups of people.
Accessibility was always DEI, heck DEIA was a common term too. The entire point of the ADA is (was?) to provide equity and inclusion for disabled people. That's the difference from everyone equally having access to stairs, vs everyone equitably having access to the second floor. It's including people in wheelchairs and who have speech impediments, instead of excluding them.
It's been clear from the beginning that getting rid of equity and inclusion included disabled people; does nobody remember when Trump made fun of the disabled reporter in his first term? He hates them.
That's truly a shame. And I don't believe accessibility is the same as DEI.
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092...
(report from October 9, 2024 released by Ted Cruz)
https://www.science.org/content/article/amid-uncertainty-her...
(Science article from November 6 which briefly discusses the Cruz report)
i guess we're gonna have to come up with new euphemisms
I remember how "master" and "slave" were banned a few years back in information technology context and people cheered that ban. And surprise surprise, the same mechanism of arbitrary bans can be turned 180 degrees. And it appears that if the only criteria is a superficial offense at the established word unrelated to the imaginary offense, then many different people can use that same mechanism to ban or attack whatever they want. From all sides of the political spectrum. Who knew, right?:)
PS: I'm against any word bans with a very few extreme exceptions. Blanket bans for whatever random person deems offensive inevitably led to this^. Like clockwork, every single time.
Since what we're looking for is a peace that eliminates collateral damage, perhaps the best course would be to reassure both sides that they can have security without having control.
In my opinion government focus should be on the education of young people, and not on trying to force and bend adults to behave in the narrow "correct" way. Again, with some exceptions. If we want more female representation in STEM - focus on education. If we want people not to use some slur or derogatory term - teach people in the school. And so on. The problem is that across the world education is a third tier activity for the government and is largely neglected. No big profits there.
Some people will choose to antagonize men or women even after being made aware of the facts. That's why people who are unwilling to tolerate a low level of bad behavior and the after-the-fact nature of punishment wind up demanding absolute and preemptive control over everybody else.
You also have to introduce rules for hiring – unless you want your interventions to have an 80-year delay on them. (Or we could make unqualified 18-year-olds responsible for hiring decisions, I suppose.) If you're training children up for careers they're going to be kept out of, you're doing everyone a disservice.
Removing reasonable discriminating items from hiring is good idea, like mandating no photos for example. But we can't remove all of it and people will still be discriminated, even just by name and surname. Then we decide to force the issue and add diversity quotas, but those are both neither enough nor are truly enforced. Then we start creating DEI departments, thought police and... well. It doesn't work very well.
Also in practice these quotas are often put at the lower rank jobs, where there is little discrimination anyway. E.g. IT industry will eat up any good candidate, usually. The problem with quotas is that we can't implement them where they are really needed - in the higher castes of social hierarchy. There are no quotas for CEOs or Senators, or top politicians etc. And really won't be.
So considering that, I tend to think that quotas is a losing game, and only education is the solution. And I mean real efforts there, not some token programs for 30 girls per nation or something. And yeah, unfortunately we will need to wait a lot.
I also think quotas are a poor solution. Pretty much all of the surface-level DEI stuff in the US is – or, I suppose, was – absurd. (Mandatory corporate training where a voice reads out a list of slurs… What problem is that meant to solve?)
However, my experience of DEI specialists is overwhelmingly positive, even those in the US. Maybe I've got lucky, and have only interacted with competent ones: who knows? But if they say a system involving quotas is the best solution currently-feasible – which iirc I have been told – then that won't convince me that quotas are good, but it will convince me that the other options are worse.
This isn't a problem with quotas. It being a problem presupposes that quotas work, surely?
I wasn’t crazy about moving away from master, but this isn’t a word ban, it’s a concept ban. They’re not really banning the word diversity, they’re banning the study of diversity by any name.
Renaming master to main, doesn’t mean that you can’t do trunk based development, it just means you’re using a different term.
Yes. That ban (sorry, I still think that's what it was in reality) was a mild one and inconsequential. I personally have no problem with that specific episode.
The real problem is that and other such minor episodes normalized word bans as a general principle. So as soon as more radical people come in power, they have used it to ban what THEY want.
Just like normalizing talks about occupation of Greenland today, will inevitably lead to the real occupation in 20-30 years in the future, by some Mango v2.0.
If there was any value at all in renaming it to main, it was preventing people from being reminded of the unhappy concept of slavery. I don't think one ban is more conceptual than the other, if there's a difference it's that scrubbing an unhappy concept from research is more pragmatically damaging than scrubbing it from nomenclature - not because one's morally better, but because the former is more difficult to evade.
I disagree. If people want to call it "main" that is OK and I do not have an objection, although slavery and racism is not a part of it. Using different words does not solve slavery or racism or anything like that.
There are some minor advantages of "main", but many of the previous objections to the change are invalid and based on ignorance of the working of git; once I figured out how it works, I do not have an objection, since you can call the branches whatever you want to do anyways, and the names "master" is not something special anyways except for what it is called if you do not otherwise specify a name. Furthermore, existing repositories on GitHub are not automatically changed, and they added function for renaming branches (which can be useful for other reasons too), so for these reasons I think what they did is good.
Some minor benefits of "main" is that it is shorter than "master" and starts with the same two letters as "master" (which might sometimes matter, e.g. if the branch names are listed in alphabetical order and you want to find them in the list). These benefits seems like only minor benefits to me, though.
However, my opinion about the change in SQLite, changing a table name from SQLITE_MASTER to SQLITE_SCHEMA, is different. I think that the new name better describes what it is for (it is the table for the schema of the database), but I would not have made that change, since it can cause problems. They did consider some of them (such as authorizer callbacks, which is something that I had thought of too before I knew what they did about it), and work around them, but that just makes it more messy, so I still think it was a bad idea, but now it is done and it would not be good to undo this change, either. If I was in charge of it I would have deferred the change until SQLite4, rather than changing SQLite3. (There is also the issue of the SQLITE_SCHEMA error code.)
Are they actually banning it? Or do they just say "we are not paying for that kind of research that we see brings no value to our society"?
That should never have been banned. It was a stupid ban then and is a stupid ban now.
Can you point me when Biden or Obama issued a word ban around the words master and slave in an IT context? Thank you.
Can you point to where Trump issued a word ban for grant funded research? Not this post, because it's not describing a word ban and it doesn't even seem to have a source.
I can in fact. Trump literally just issued a mass retraction and censorship of research publication depending on a set of keywords [1]. That is, by definition, a word ban for CDC-funded research. In fact you posted in that thread on HN, so you should already be very well aware of it.
[1] https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-news-cdc-orde...
This was DC city government not Obama and Biden.
There was never a ban like this on the master-slave terminology. A lot of places started moving away from those terms, but plenty of others just kept the old naming. There was no top-down directive from the federal government like there is here - I don't think it's fair to compare them as if they are equivalent situations. This is heavy-handed in a way that makes peer pressure look completely benign in comparison.
The same issue as with some other terms in 21st century. For example monopoly by the 19th century definition would be almost impossible today, because "look, that company has a whopping 0.1% of the market, hence we with 99.9% are not a monopoly". So yeah, it wasn't banned everywhere, but that reached momentum wide enough for me to consider it essentially a ban.
And as a I said below, even if call it not a ban but idk "popular advisory", the point is that it set a precedent. And now right wingers would really ban words they don't like.
Also they may argue that they did not ban their words either. Can you apply for grant elsewhere? Yes you can, technically. "So what the problem"(c) they will ask.
It's different because it's the federal government. You can't compare it to a bunch of companies deciding to do the same thing because of popular opinion. While both processes have their own mechanism for driving conformity, one is essentially democratic, while the other is strongly autocratic.
A lot of people like to focus very exclusive on the aspect if its top-down, with the implied message being that censorship is acceptable as long its done by companies or community leaders rather than government. Yes, it is worse when it is done by governments. But no, it doesn't make censorship acceptable. So much debate happens because some people view all censorship as bad, that is rules intended to inhibit speech and shutdown wrong-thinking, while others want to distinguish between government censorship and "good" censorship. As someone who stand in the "all censorship as bad" category, there is no good censorship! Only grades of wrong.
Different wrongness do get compare. That doesn't make very very very wrong to be equivalent to just very wrong. Both are however wrong. The kind of censorship and self-censorship we have seen in science, popular media and even humor in the last few decades has been insane compared to the decades previous. To throw in a random example, someone who criticized religion was murdered a few days ago in Sweden, and as a society we kind just expected it and waiting for it to happen. Something like Monty Python could not exist today as they would had either been censored or murdered, and so they would have been forced to self-censor long before their skills as comedians would have grown.
Censorship is not something we can pick and choose from.
Then you agree that what's going on now is wrong, and there's no need to bring up lesser wrongs to distract us from that.
Obviously yes. Censorship is not something we can pick and choose from.
There would not be a need for that if people agreed that censorship is wrong. As long people see some censorship as good, rather than a lesser wrongs, the trend of ever more censorship will just continue and this kind of events will continue to occur and at larger scope. Censorship is a kind of political violence that once accepted only expands until the social rules totally breaks apart. It can't exit as just a rule for the government, it must be something that people inherently support as a concept.
Voluntarily choosing not to say something is preference, not self-censorship. For example, some people choose not to swear because they don't like swears. That is just a preference, self-censorship is when you want to swear but don't because of external pressure.
Nobody was forced to stop using master/slave, some companies just chose not to because that was their preference. They didn't want to use the word slave anymore. It's reasonable to call it pointless or performative, but I don't think any of the decision-makers at these companies were forced into it. Most companies did not change anything, and they faced absolutely no consequences.
I'm sure there were some (for example) GitHub employees who didn't agree with the decision and maybe felt censored, but basically every company on the planet has standards for language in the workplace, so in that sense every company is guilty of censorship. GitHub did not force any of its users to do anything, you could still use whatever language you want, and you can search "slave" right now to see how common it still is.
Let's not mix up issues though.
Removing 'master' in git has much less justification than removing master/slave terminology.
Nobody removed “master” from git though
https://github.com/github/renaming
https://www.theserverside.com/feature/Why-GitHub-renamed-its...
They did stuff. Plenty qualifies as "removing". (And I didn't say they reached out and changed the entire world.)
And unlike master/slave, it's fake inclusivity.
Cool story, nobody removed “master” from git though
The justification is irrelevant. You can think it's as dumb as you want to, it still isn't censorship if nobody is being forced to do anything.
Are you pretending that the previous administrations did not lean on tech companies to directly censor speech - or do you really not know?
"banned"? Like there's some singular entity in charge of all of IT that gets to ban things?
Yes, we have mandatory linter rules which won’t let us check in code that contains the word “whitelist” or “blacklist” or “master” because they are somehow racist.
I work at the biggest tech company, which employs hundreds of thousands of people and these rules are applied across all codebases.
This stuff is widespread across big companies and the government.
That's just your organization, I meant "all of IT" when I said "all of IT".
There are posters here acting as if there is a singular entity in charge of IT, that forces this rule on everyone.
I don't see what consequence it is that your particular organization prefers to do things its own way. It's a completely different proposition from pretending like the word is banned outright for everyone, by someone.
There's a pretty big difference between a private company pandering to progressives by banning a few words versus the federal government suddenly declaring that many different words and concepts are banned. These NSF flags are just one case out of many, similar changes are being rushed out across every federal department. I agree that the word bans at your company are stupid, but the govt changes are a whole other level of bad.
That ban is imaginary. It never existed. Many people decided to use other terms at their free will and others didn't. Both terms can be still found in plenty of projects.
Master. Slave. Look at me go!
Oh no! You're banned now! Look, the international word police has put a warrant out for you.
And other problems that do not exist.
Absolutely correct.
We’re still not allowed to use “whitelist” and “blacklist” because it’s somehow racism.
We have linters which bar us from checking in code with these words and a bot which scolds us publicly in chats.
Now the same people who applauded that policing of speech suddenly are offended when their explicit political speech is being removed.
It’s just simply hypocrisy.
Way to 'what about' speech policing. Yay to normalizing less freedoms because 'someone else did something too'.
I’m not trying to what about anything, I’m actually a fairly extreme free speech absolutist.
I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy, the people complaining the loudest are the same people who exuberantly censor people they disagree with.
These type of people have lost moral authority.
that is quite disturbing to me
That's ridiculous. I use whitelist and blacklist just fine and have for the last decade plus. No one in the government told me it wasn't allowed.
You're really offended by these linters huh.
I resent others trying to police my language, especially when the language is not offensive.
People who do this obviously get joy out of bossing other people around and pretending they are being virtuous.
It's a strange hill to die on brother.
But you do you.
When you say they were "banned", do you mean a handful of companies voluntarily decided to stop using those words internally and published blog posts about it? I don't recall it going any further than that.
These were not banned. I still call master-slave systems master-slave, and I haven't gotten banned from anywhere because of that. Some people don't like it, and other people don't like that some people don't like it, and some people ban its usage from their platforms, and other people enforce its usage on their platforms, which sounds like a free marketplace of ideas to me!
Nothing was banned, culture changed.
This happens as you age. The world and customs you grew up with, despite how they may feel too you, are not the natural state of the world.
Accept that new customs may replace them.
Agreed. It's groups in multiple camps that want to force everyone to change how they do things. Superficial, performative "action" and causes don't change anything. Let's just be sensible and try not to harm or discriminate against anyone for any of their attributes. How is this so difficult? I think it's that there are too many people who have firmly married their identities to hate of their socially-acceptable (in their hermetically-sealed echo chamber of team red or team blue) scapegoats.
It's chilling that the new administration's first priority is to defund projects that don't agree with their ideology, and make an explicit show of it.
That said, this specific post is over-egging the post it's quoting.
The original post is https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:aixj65vnqpllcjnc4ante42b/po... by Darby Saxbe at USC, leaking materials from an NSF Program Officer. She says these are words that "can cause a grant to be pulled". What she's leaking appears to be inference done, over a partial set of "flagged" awards, and the keywords drawn from them. It does not say this is the official list of keywords.
The accompanying decision tree - what the NSF is being ordered to do - says if the "keywords and context" of various parts of the grant application "implicate" Trump's executive orders (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14151), then they must keep the flag and mark that they found "DEIA and other EO language" -- but if not, they can remove the flag. So if you proposed "Systemic analysis of the bigliest cofeve all women find irresistible", you'd likely get funded, because the context reveals you're a big Trump suck-up, even if you used words like "systemic" and "women".
What I get from the original post is the word "systemic" is not actually banned, and may not even be a "keyword" causing awards to be "flagged". But if you're dependent on a grant from NSF for your livelyhood, you obviously want the greatest chances of being funded, and simply not knowing what the orange one is going to fuck about with next, or what exactly he's instructed people to do, is a great cause of anxiety. That's information asymmetry, and it's a form of power in itself. And he's already fucked about by stopping all funding immediately and only adding it back after review. But don't let posts that are also unofficial add to your anxiety.
Is there any official confirmation of this? A random post on mastodon about a random post on bluesky isn’t really very meaningful.
I'd imagine by "official confirmation" you don't mean the government that is currently shutting down their websites, scrubbing data and destroying the idea of transparency. The concept of trust has flown right out the window. If I had to chose who to believe on this topic right now, sadly, it would in fact be this random post on bluesky.
thats not the america i want to live in, but it does appear to be the one we are currently in.
Truthfully, the words are not "forbidden". Using them in a grant application might decrease the chances of receiving a grant. Nothing stops anyone from using them.
Just like getting demonetized on YouTube, then. Maybe we'll see grant proposals to study "dis@bility progression in Multiple Sclerosis", "light p0larization" and "weights and b!ases"
"A systematic review of studies on the possible relationship between high lead levels in soil, and rates of unaliving."
corporate wants you to find out the difference between these two pictures…
Here’s a relevant XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1357/
I was shown this back in college when I raised concerns about how cancel culture was stifling the free exchange of ideas and when I argued against the idea that speech was the same thing as violence. I guess if this is the world we live in the same thing applies in the other direction.
“The first amendment doesn’t shield you from criticism or consequences”
“It’s just that people listening think you’re an asshole”
“And they’re showing you the door”
Don't worry I'm sure when Musk, the self proclaimed Free Speech Absolutist, hears about this he'll require them to reverse course immediately.
Yes and I’m sure if he’s on board with this somehow, that it’s for a really good reason!
Well my last successful NSF award certainly uses the word polarization... In the context of electromagnetic fields....