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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

It’s telling that the lead into the article, and the very first substantive sub-heading, is focused on DEI. You have to get halfway through the article before you get to the administration’s efforts to defund climate science.

I’d submit that using “science” as a human shield to protect DEI programs is a bad idea for “science.” Scientists dependent on public funding undermine their credibility on the issues within their distinct expertise when they yoke themselves to unrelated social issues and ideologies.

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The corollary to that is to make sure that not everything that looks like DEI is actually DEI, or has a good reason for it. For example, applications for telescope time had an acceptance rate skewed towards application proposals from specific demographics. When they changed it to redact the person's name prior to being evaluated for merit, the distribution followed a more normal curve. Is this DEI, or is it taking action so that the most scientifically beneficial proposals get pushed through?

Getting rid of these biasis is mostly what DEI is.

I don't see any of this. It's a short article, and it provides the broader context of the administration's cuts up front, which is normal for journalistic writing. And even if we give you the benefit of the doubt that the order in which things are mentioned matters: It mentions climate defunding twice before mentioning diversity. And I can't interpret the mentions of DEI cuts as somehow insidious - they're brief and objective. I.e. I don't know what "human shield" could mean here.

> Scientists dependent on public funding undermine their credibility on the issues within their distinct expertise when they yoke themselves to unrelated social issues and ideologies.

You can't act like diversity issues don't impact science because they fucking do except for maths, physics and chemistry. For example epidemiology, we've seen that in Covid - poorer areas and areas with higher rates of non-white populations had significantly more cases. Medicine in general is riddled with issues of gender bias, not to mention ethnicity differences in genetic expression or outright "fake science" like the all too common assumption that Black people or women have a higher pain tolerance.

It's not about "yoking themselves to social issues" - looking at DEI aspects is good scientific practice, alone because your science can only ever be as good as your dataset, and a dataset of white young men is going to ignore a whole lot of issues.

As for grant programs preferring "DEI hires"... the "glass ceiling" effect is real, and the current administration is setting the clock back decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_ceiling

As much as I loathe diving into the utter cesspool of US politics, I do need to point out that the article is simply quoting the goals of Project 2025, which prominently include:

to “defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America”.

You are pretending that Nature is the one who cares about DEI, when in fact it is the Project 2025 partisans who made this their flagship concern. This comes across as quite dishonest.

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