Its not fraud. The grant proposal accurately describes the research occurring, and people evaluating the grant will have no misconception about what they are funding. The problem is that political appointees have been applying dumb keyword searches which block research that has nothing to do with the issues they object to. Like using privilege in the computer security sense. Or bias in the statistical sense, unrelated to political leaning.
Take a look at the comments left by that profile. I don’t think that they would be able to understand what you are saying here, all they see is red.
A partial recent comment “qcnguy” made: “DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Requiring the PSF to dump DEI if they want the money is good for everyone, because DEI is bad for people”
It's worth pointing out that this profile has been around for three months and already has enough karma to have access to the "flag" and "vouch" tools.
It's also worth pointing out that despite this thread being full of ridiculously low quality posts, I haven't flagged any of them. That's the sort of thing DEI leftists do, not everyone.
It doesn't matter if you have used them in this thread or not. An account of your age and your disposition should not have access to automated moderation tools, period.
Moderation via easily gamified populism is the worst kind of moderation.
Because the leftists flagging and downvoting everything they disagree with in this thread are clearly exemplars of excellent user moderation? Knock it off.
This is a contradiction. There's no such thing, only shades of bad, and HN has about the worst possible implementation.
For what it's worth, I didn't flag or downvote you. YC is seemingly fine with your behavior, and I've seen much worse out of people who have been here longer. I'd rather your mask-off rants be out in the open than swept under the rug.
> The entire point is to create misconceptions in the people evaluating the grant. That is grant fraud.
No and no. It was just explicitly and intricately explained to you how that's not true, and you didn't even engage with the explanation.
The censors are filtering words not on the meaning of the words but based on the existence of other meanings of words. It's blatantly horrific behavior, in violation of any basic code of ethics or morals.
No fraud is being described in these comments by the grant applicants. However, among those trying to perpetrate political correctness on the a non-political process, unethical behavior abounds.
> Undoubtably their searches have also been finding lots of research that is related to what they object to. You can't use the existence of mistakes to claim that deceiving the government therefore isn't fraud. That's not how the law works.
First, having political objections to some types of research and imposing that sort of political filter is highly unethical in these scientific positions. Second, because they sometimes execute this political censorship successfully does not justify the inaccurate political censorship.
Nobody supporting anything like this has a leg to stand on about laws or legality or anything relating to the rule of law. The Trump administration is acting completely lawlessly, ignores court orders, and has zero regard for the constitution.
I don't recall the government making hugely significant financial decisions about science funding on those grounds, any more than people "falling over themselves" to shave two characters off the default branch name. Nor do I remember DEI being quite as harmful to the humans as master/slave relations in the US. But, it is completely in line with these sorts of politicians and their supporters to criticize people for something, and then act 10x as bad.
I didn't engage with the explanation because nobody has provided one. This whole thread is just people asserting that it's OK to change a few words and continue doing what they were previously doing, because Trump. There's no deeper logic and that's not an intricate explanation. It is, in fact, fraud.
Nobody here is actually confused about any of this. You're all defending fraud because you hate the victims of it, not out of any intellectual principle. The government doesn't want to fund certain kinds of work. People who want to grab money for that work anyway are manipulating the language they use whilst refusing to change what they're really doing. That is grant fraud. Merely asserting it's not over and over will not help you when lawsuits start flying.
That's academics. The PSF, despite how awful this blog post makes it look, is at least doing what it's supposed to be doing: taking the requirements seriously and refusing the money.
> First, having political objections to some types of research and imposing that sort of political filter is highly unethical in these scientific positions
Python hacking isn't science! But if you want to talk about academic research instead, the time for academics to make this argument was 50 years ago. Nobody is going to buy the idea it's unacceptable to be political from academics of all people. There is no group more blatantly political: if it's unethical to impose "political filters" on "scientific positions" then academia needs to engage in massive purges of itself because it's overrun with unethical behavior.
> The Trump administration is acting completely lawlessly, ignores court orders, and has zero regard for the constitution.
It and its congressional allies literally makes the law, there is nothing in the constitution requiring the government to fund DEI and it is doing so because it won an election in which it said it'd do all these things. It's academia that's acting lawlessly, ignoring direct orders from its funding sources and has zero regard for the constitution - which puts the executive and Congress in charge of grant funding, not grantees or the PSF.
