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.
foxglacier 2 minutes ago [-]
Reading comprehension is shocking, not just in you but most people here. The post just said "can cause a grant to be pulled". That's entirely consistent with this list being a screening filter and somebody will look at what the grant/application is actually for. There's no claim that it would ban those things you listed. Nor is there any claim that these are banned words or it's against free speech. The government wants to clean up ideologically driven government funded research and those ideological researchers do insert these kinds of words in unrelated work. In fact, it used to be that you got an advantage in grant applications by pretending your research would somehow help marginalized groups or whatever, even if it had nothing to do with it. That is a problem and it's good they're trying to fix it.
rsynnott 3 minutes ago [-]
I mean, look, these aren’t clever people.
aeve890 5 hours ago [-]
Also "polarization".
anotherhue 5 hours ago [-]
Does that fall under global warming denial?
kardianos 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 13 minutes ago [-]
Please don't cross into personal attack or name-calling, no matter how wrong another comment is or you feel it is.
Where is the government going to find all these censors with working minds? No American would consent to doing that unless their zeal had blinded them from something much more important than the compliance of a physics paper.
sterlind 3 minutes ago [-]
I'm sure DOGE could provision an LLM to censor at scale. Unthinkingly obedient language models enforcing dictates is an authoritarian's wet dream.
Yizahi 4 hours ago [-]
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.
philipov 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
foxglacier 19 seconds ago [-]
Point to this top-down directive banning those words. It doesn't exist, does it?
techbananas 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Yizahi 4 hours ago [-]
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.
whatshisface 4 hours ago [-]
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.
fzeroracer 6 minutes ago [-]
Can you point me when Biden or Obama issued a word ban around the words master and slave in an IT context? Thank you.
glitchc 3 hours ago [-]
That should never have been banned. It was a stupid ban then and is a stupid ban now.
whatshisface 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Yizahi 4 hours ago [-]
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.
whatshisface 4 hours ago [-]
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.
bhouston 5 hours ago [-]
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:
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.
larsiusprime 20 seconds ago [-]
FIRE has been around for decades and has dutifully resisted acquiring a partisan valence
9283409232 5 hours ago [-]
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.
drawkward 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sincerecook 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
drawkward 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sincerecook 5 hours ago [-]
That's literally what the quote says: "From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled". And then it goes on to quote a long list of words that would be characteristic of woke social science "research".
drawkward 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
3 hours ago [-]
sincerecook 4 hours ago [-]
You're not being very charitable, have you considered that you may be letting your biases have an undue influence on your judgement here?
9283409232 4 hours ago [-]
I would flip this back on you. They gave a very good example of these rules being used for censorship with DeSantis prosecuting scientist for reporting numbers. Selective enforcement is a known thing so is your affection for the people in charge stopping you from seeing the obvious problem here?
sincerecook 4 hours ago [-]
I support the purported intent of this policy, not the misuse of it. But that's something that has to be challenged when it happens, and it hasn't happened yet. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to make any policy since it could always potentially be misused. For the record I expect there will be some misuse of it, but broadly I also expect it to curtail the fake woke "science" that was itself a kind of misuse of the system.
drawkward 4 hours ago [-]
...can you point to some of this 'fake "woke" science'?
To be clear, I would be in support of this policy even if there was no evidence because it sets a tone that I think is positive.
9283409232 2 hours ago [-]
The tone it sets is that "we don't care about studying anything relating to minorities or people who weren't born with a silver spoon" which I wouldn't call a positive tone.
sincerecook 2 hours ago [-]
That's an exaggeration, though it may end up going too far. Unfortunately, given how much the wokesters forced this crap on everyone there's bound to be a reaction and that's what we're seeing now.
9283409232 1 hours ago [-]
The list very clearly spells it out and it will go that far if it hasn't already.
drawkward 4 hours ago [-]
I was being charitable by asking whether you are gullible or a parrot. Gullible is the charitable interpretation. This whole action has been done on a pretext of lies: getting politics out of science, when it fact is is putting politics into science.
sincerecook 1 hours ago [-]
The politics was already in the science. So in the same spirit of being charitable that you afforded me, are you naive or foolish?
9283409232 1 hours ago [-]
Politics and science are inseparable. There is no such thing as no politics in science.
kardianos 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
subsection1h 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
drawkward 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
footy 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 11 minutes ago [-]
Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how wrong another comment is or you feel it is.
Is there any official confirmation of this? A random post on mastodon about a random post on bluesky isn’t really very meaningful.
j7ake 5 hours ago [-]
RIP statisticians and Ml researchers who use the word “bias” in their work.
manvillej 5 hours ago [-]
RIP Academia as a whole
whatshisface 5 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
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.
drawkward 5 hours ago [-]
thus begins the end of pax americana; you can't have a space-age economy if you don't have science.
jeffbee 3 minutes ago [-]
Isn't "Space Age" derogatory at this point? That's how I use it: to mean something that is obsolete.
glitchc 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
footy 5 hours ago [-]
hi my partner is a neuroscientist and multiple words on this list appear on any one of her proposals. She doesn't even work with humans.
If you think this only affects social sciences you don't have the requisite knowledge to have an opinion here.
9283409232 5 hours ago [-]
You think only social sciences use the words "bias" and "gender?"
drawkward 5 hours ago [-]
if you think the term "women" is only relevant in social science and pop psychology, it begs the question whether you are informed enough to have an opinion worth considering.
gorpnuts 5 hours ago [-]
I like how you used the idiom begs the question correctly and OP didn’t.
drawkward 4 hours ago [-]
Let's be honest: nothing MAGA is based on intellectual rigor.
3 hours ago [-]
outlore 2 hours ago [-]
corporate wants you to find out the difference between these two pictures…
honeybadger1 4 minutes ago [-]
oh lord, word bans are stupid, but the account posting this is no shining star either.
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.
glitchc 3 hours ago [-]
That's truly a shame. And I don't believe accessibility is the same as DEI.
theossuary 5 hours ago [-]
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.
amiga386 4 hours ago [-]
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.
greenie_beans 4 hours ago [-]
i guess we're gonna have to come up with new euphemisms
ykonstant 4 hours ago [-]
Mods, what the hell is going on with all the flagging on this topic? For each flagged submission we get some feeble (non)excuse so we could say "all right, fine", but then on the whole the effect is that all submissions regarding this topic disappear from the first (and second, and third) page rapidly. This is blatant censorship and it is ridiculous to pretend otherwise. Can the moderators stop this or not?
Edit: this comment was downvoted within a second of my clicking "submit". How is this possible, Dang?
thinkingemote 4 hours ago [-]
Mods can unflag a story if they deem it important, high quality, giving new information etc. Also "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Perhaps users saw the quality of the comments and chose to flag, or perhaps they saw the quality of the submission.
I also think there's an auto-flag mechanism that kicks in automatically. I don't know how that works, but I'm guessing if I was to write one it would detect patterns of downvotes in comments, number of users who upvoted the submission vs number of comments, and the use of negative and emotional language.
ykonstant 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
comrade_dang 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
SV_BubbleTime 5 hours ago [-]
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?
Science.org is big-S. It’s a blog, not a scientific paper. Maybe you could go back and look at their early and mid-COVID articles.
Also, notice that they correctly state it is a REVIEW. Not a ban.
So the post here about forbidden words and bans is complete bullshit.
barbazoo 5 hours ago [-]
Very misleading title
bhouston 5 hours ago [-]
In what way? This is a list of words to identify applications that the Trump admin wants to deny grants to. Isn't that restricting research quite broadly based on very ideological grounds? This isn't about US research priorities, it is just political interference.
5 hours ago [-]
5 hours ago [-]
ajp-stl 5 hours ago [-]
flagged != forbidden
drawkward 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lelanthran 4 hours ago [-]
Youvegone through this entire thread calling everyone who points out that the title is misleading gullible or evil.
The title is literally different to the article; people complaining that review is not the same as banned aren't evil in the same way that people who complained about master vs main weren't evil.
drawkward 3 hours ago [-]
In point of fact, I have been asking whether they are parroting lies or gullible.
This type of "review" is simple McCarthyism. DeSantis, in Florida, has shown us how this goes. The Trump admin is doing this on a pretext of removing politics from science, when it is demonstrably injecting politics into science.
lelanthran 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but we saw this coming years ago when hordes were cheering actual banning of words. I wasn't the only one on various forums who pointed out to all those cheerleaders in the "main replaces master or you're a nazi" camp that normalizing banning of words can only hurt in the long run.
I do not support banning of speech in any but the most extreme cases, but this still uses "review" at least. The previous "master vs main" proponents didn't even bother to pretend that there was any context in which master would be approved.
We've been warning for years, stop being so extreme. And now you, too, gets to see the result of normalizing language policing.
Enjoy.
drawkward 3 hours ago [-]
Believe it or not, while I think that MAGA is on the precipice of turning the USA into a fascist state, I, too, oppose the control of language.
drawkward 5 hours ago [-]
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.
zellyn 5 hours ago [-]
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".
glitchc 3 hours ago [-]
Some users would like to ban the article that discusses the ban since it contains comments that they don't like about said ban.
bhouston 5 hours ago [-]
It was "flagged" by users.
yodon 5 hours ago [-]
> Why did this just plummet to page three? Very weird.
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.
SV_BubbleTime 5 hours ago [-]
Might have something to do with the title being intentionally misleading.
These words MAY get your submitting FLAGGED.
They are not banned words.
It seems right or wrong, someone has decided that social science submissions that use these words MAY have been questionable and they want to curb them or at least get them in front on immediate review.
drawkward 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
drawkward 5 hours ago [-]
because the comment section is going to be a shitshow, just like the Trump administration.
drawkward 5 hours ago [-]
@dang, please prevent this topic from being flagged. this is news and relevant
comrade_dang 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
SV_BubbleTime 5 hours ago [-]
Title is misleading. Words are not forbidden or banned.
Submissions with these words may get additional review.
drawkward 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
T3RMINATED 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
5 hours ago [-]
gorpnuts 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hotpepperishot 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sam345 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
drawkward 5 hours ago [-]
your comment is being flagged because you are using terms that the zeitgeist does not approve of...
do you think that is reasonable?
now, apply that to science funding.
slackfan 5 hours ago [-]
Freedom of speech does not imply freedom of funding.
5 hours ago [-]
theossuary 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
drawkward 5 hours ago [-]
unless it is for right wing political campaigns! then it is all good, per Citizens United
Rendered at 20:06:19 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
- 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.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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.
Renaming master to main, doesn’t mean that you can’t do trunk based development, it just means you’re using a different term.
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.
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
Party of free speech that wants to protect women according to their supporters.
To be clear, I would be in support of this policy even if there was no evidence because it sets a tone that I think is positive.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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...
(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)
If you think this only affects social sciences you don't have the requisite knowledge to have an opinion here.
"#Bisexual #Xennial #Progressive #Transhumanism #Space #London #SimCity4 #Worldbuilding"
vomit
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 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.
Edit: this comment was downvoted within a second of my clicking "submit". How is this possible, Dang?
Perhaps users saw the quality of the comments and chose to flag, or perhaps they saw the quality of the submission.
I also think there's an auto-flag mechanism that kicks in automatically. I don't know how that works, but I'm guessing if I was to write one it would detect patterns of downvotes in comments, number of users who upvoted the submission vs number of comments, and the use of negative and emotional language.
Surely HN users wouldn’t be so quick to just believe a random mastadon post because it aligns with their own <flagged words>, right?
Also, notice that they correctly state it is a REVIEW. Not a ban.
So the post here about forbidden words and bans is complete bullshit.
The title is literally different to the article; people complaining that review is not the same as banned aren't evil in the same way that people who complained about master vs main weren't evil.
This type of "review" is simple McCarthyism. DeSantis, in Florida, has shown us how this goes. The Trump admin is doing this on a pretext of removing politics from science, when it is demonstrably injecting politics into science.
I do not support banning of speech in any but the most extreme cases, but this still uses "review" at least. The previous "master vs main" proponents didn't even bother to pretend that there was any context in which master would be approved.
We've been warning for years, stop being so extreme. And now you, too, gets to see the result of normalizing language policing.
Enjoy.
MAGA is a death cult.
[Edit] A few seconds later, I cannot find it no matter how many times I click "more".
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.
These words MAY get your submitting FLAGGED.
They are not banned words.
It seems right or wrong, someone has decided that social science submissions that use these words MAY have been questionable and they want to curb them or at least get them in front on immediate review.
Submissions with these words may get additional review.
do you think that is reasonable?
now, apply that to science 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.