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John Baez (Feb 14 2025 at 03:03):The US Senate has a new press release saying, among other things:
Cruz-Led Investigation Uncovers $2 Billion in Woke DEI Grants at NSF, Releases Full Database
U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released a database identifying over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion in federal funding awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the Biden-Harris administration. This funding was diverted toward questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.
One of these grants is Emily Riehl's project "Homotopical macrocosms for higher category theory".
You can see a complete list of all 3,400 grants on a spreadsheet here. The grants are classified as mentioning one or more of 4 things: social justice, race, gender, and environmental justice. Riehl's grant is flagged as mentioning social justice. She probably got in trouble for the following passage:
IN PARALLEL, THE PI HAS CONCRETE PLANS TO CONTINUE HER EXPOSITORY AND OUTREACH WORK WHICH INCLUDE A NEW BOOK (ELEMENTS OF INFINITY-CATEGORY THEORY, JOINT WITH VERITY), LECTURES DIRECTED AT THE GENERAL PUBLIC, SURVEY ARTICLES PREPARED FOR A VARIETY OF AUDIENCES, AND EFFORTS TO IMPROVE ACCESS TO ADVANCED MATHEMATICS, SUCH AS HER SERVICE ON THE EQUITY, DIVERSITY, AND INCLUSION ADVISORY BOARD AT THE BANFF INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH STATION.
Below I have quoted the entire grant description on that spreadsheet:
HOMOTOPICAL MACROCOSMS FOR HIGHER CATEGORY THEORY - HIGHER CATEGORY THEORY IS INCREASINGLY BEING USED AS THE METATHEORY FOR NEW RESULTS IN SEVERAL AREAS OF MATHEMATICS, CREATING A HUGE BARRIER TO ENTRY FOR MATHEMATICIANS WHOSE PRIMARY TECHNICAL EXPERTISE LIES IN ANOTHER FIELD. PAST JOINT WORK OF THE PI REIMAGINED THE FOUNDATIONS OF INFINITE-DIMENSIONAL CATEGORY THEORY WITH THE AIM OF SIMPLIFYING PROOFS BY REPLACING ANALYTIC METHODS, THAT RELY ON THE COMBINATORICS OF A PARTICULAR MODEL OF INFINITE-DIMENSIONAL CATEGORIES, WITH SYNTHETIC ONES THAT APPLY IN ANY MODEL. ONE PART OF THIS PROJECT SEEKS TO DEVELOP A COMPUTER-VERIFIABLE FORMAL LANGUAGE THAT EXPRESSES ONLY STATEMENTS ABOUT INFINITE-DIMENSIONAL CATEGORIES THAT ARE INVARIANT UNDER CHANGE OF MODEL. SUCH A LANGUAGE WOULD FORCE USERS TO SPEAK NO EVIL BY GUARANTEEING THAT EVERY STATEMENT THEY EXPRESS IS MODEL-INDEPENDENT. THIS PROJECT CONNECTS TO THE PLANS TO RECAST THE THEORY OF INFINITE-DIMENSIONAL CATEGORIES IN A NEW PROPOSED UNIVALENT FOUNDATION SYSTEM FOR MATHEMATICS, IN WHICH HOMOTOPICAL UNIQUENESS UP TO A CONTRACTIBLE SPACE OF CHOICES BECOMES GENUINE UNIQUENESS, PERMITTING STREAMLINED DEFINITIONS OF FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS. BOTH OF THESE PROJECTS WILL BE UNDERTAKEN IN PART WITH MENTEES OF THE PI AT JOHNS HOPKINS. IN PARALLEL, THE PI HAS CONCRETE PLANS TO CONTINUE HER EXPOSITORY AND OUTREACH WORK WHICH INCLUDE A NEW BOOK (ELEMENTS OF INFINITY-CATEGORY THEORY, JOINT WITH VERITY), LECTURES DIRECTED AT THE GENERAL PUBLIC, SURVEY ARTICLES PREPARED FOR A VARIETY OF AUDIENCES, AND EFFORTS TO IMPROVE ACCESS TO ADVANCED MATHEMATICS, SUCH AS HER SERVICE ON THE EQUITY, DIVERSITY, AND INCLUSION ADVISORY BOARD AT THE BANFF INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH STATION. THE PIONEERS OF HOMOTOPY TYPE THEORY - THE NEW PROPOSED UNIVALENT FOUNDATION SYSTEM - ENVISIONED A COMPUTER-VERIFIABLE FOUNDATION FOR INFINITE-DIMENSIONAL CATEGORY THEORY, BUT SOME COMPUTATIONAL CONTENT IS LOST THROUGH THE CLASSICAL REASONING USED IN CLASSICAL HOMOTOPY THEORY. WITH COLLABORATORS, THE PI WILL DEVELOP A NEW MODEL FOR CLASSICAL HOMOTOPY THEORY IN A PARTICULAR CATEGORY OF CUBICAL SETS, IN WHICH CUBICAL FIBRATIONS ARE REQUIRED TO BE EQUIVARIANT, RESPECTING THE SYMMETRIES OF CUBES DEFINED BY PERMUTING THEIR DIMENSIONS. A LONGER-TERM AIM IS TO USE SIMILAR METHODS TO OBTAIN CUBICAL SET BASED PRESENTATIONS OF ALL INFINITY-TOPOI. A COMPUTER PROOF ASSISTANT BASED ON EQUIVARIANT CUBICAL FIBRATIONS WOULD HAVE THE CORRECT CLASSICAL SEMANTICS BUT WOULD BE ABLE TO RESTORE THE COMPUTATIONAL CONTENT TO UNIVALENT MATHEMATICS. A FINAL PROJECT EXPLORES HOMOTOPICAL MACROCOSMS FOR HIGHER CATEGORY THEORY, AIMING TO PROVE THAT THE COLLECTION OF CARTESIAN FIBRATIONS BETWEEN (INFINITY,N)-CATEGORIES ASSEMBLE INTO A CARTESIAN FIBRATION OF (INFINITY,N+1)-CATEGORIES, WHICH CAN BE REGARDED AS SOME SORT OF CATEGORIFIED HYPERDOCTRINE FOR (INFINITY,N)-CATEGORY THEORY. RESULTS OF THIS NATURE WOULD ESTABLISH A GLOBAL LIFTING PROPERTY AGAINST HOMOTOPY COHERENT DIAGRAMS THAT SHOULD AID FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS IN (INFINITY,N)-CATEGORY THEORY. THIS AWARD REFLECTS NSF'S STATUTORY MISSION AND HAS BEEN DEEMED WORTHY OF SUPPORT THROUGH EVALUATION USING THE FOUNDATION'S INTELLECTUAL MERIT AND BROADER IMPACTS REVIEW CRITERIA.
Ryan Wisnesky (Feb 14 2025 at 03:24):no good deed goes unpunished
fosco (Feb 14 2025 at 11:26):be US senator
read -category theory book searching for neo-Marxist warfare propaganda
"unstraightening"
Tobias Fritz (Feb 14 2025 at 12:07):So what is the point of this "uncovering" of "woke" grants? Those grants have been awarded and there's no way to roll that back, right? Right...?
Tobias Fritz (Feb 14 2025 at 12:09):My guess would be that the point is to scandalize awarded grants in order to rally support for slashing NSF funding for future grants, including those that are currently review.
Tobias Fritz (Feb 14 2025 at 12:11):There's also an interesting post about this on Astral Codex Ten: Only About 40% Of The Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science
Ivan Di Liberti (Feb 14 2025 at 12:45):fosco said:
be US senator
read -category theory book searching for neo-Marxist warfare propaganda
"unstraightening"
Funnily enough, they would indeed find Mao's quotes in some of Lawvere's papers.
Arturo De Faveri (Feb 14 2025 at 13:04):Rick Kubelka on mathoverflow: "When I was at the University of Oklahoma in the early '80s, we were all required to write a brief description of our research for the (rather conservative, this being Oklahoma) Board of Regents of the University. A colleague in algebra, perhaps hoping for more state support, wrote that he was studying "annihilating radical left ideals."
JR (Feb 14 2025 at 14:03):Tobias Fritz said:
So what is the point of this "uncovering" of "woke" grants? Those grants have been awarded and there's no way to roll that back, right? Right...?
From https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R48243:
Federal grants are awarded under legally binding agreements, such as grant agreements or cooperative agreements. These agreements include terms and conditions that are required to be met by the grantee in order for the grantee to be in compliance with federal statutory and regulatory provisions. When the grantee is found to be in noncompliance with the terms and conditions of a federal grant award, the grantee may be required to return the funds to the federal government. The process by which a federal agency seeks repayment of expended funds for noncompliance is known as recoupment where the federal government is seeking to recoup funds previously paid to the grantee. Recoupment processes are sometimes called grant funding clawbacks since the federal government is taking back previously awarded funding.
This is happening: the USG is taking granted money back out of accounts.
JR (Feb 14 2025 at 14:06):The legality of the current clawbacks is not something that I think the administration is concerned with. Illegality is a feature, not a bug.
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 14 2025 at 15:31):that's depressing...
Tobias Fritz (Feb 14 2025 at 15:32):Thanks @JR. That's infuriating!
John Baez (Feb 14 2025 at 16:44):Tobias Fritz said:
So what is the point of this "uncovering" of "woke" grants? Those grants have been awarded and there's no way to roll that back, right? Right...?
I guess you missed the whole episode where the NSF froze all grants, and scientists including grad students weren't getting paid until a judge demanded it:
NSF officially paused payments on January 28, saying that the agency needed time to review how its grants comply with President Trump's executive orders, especially those aiming to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the government.
This case may go to a higher court now - I don't think anyone knows. But there's no law of physics compelling the executive branch to pay the money it has promised it would pay, and at this point it's only the laws of physics that I trust to be enforced in the USA.
Tobias Fritz (Feb 14 2025 at 17:25):Thanks! There's so much bad stuff going on these days that it's really hard to keep track
John Baez (Feb 14 2025 at 17:37):I spend about an hour a day keeping track of US politics now. It's like the ship is going down.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Feb 14 2025 at 18:32):Without wishing to (explicitly) incite anything, how much would more will it take before people in the US start physically resisting what's happening?
Chaitanya Leena Subramaniam (Feb 14 2025 at 18:39):We'd do well to heed warnings from other countries that arbitrary and extensive budget cuts may in fact foreshadow the dismantling of the NSF as an institution.
Take the example of my home country:
The University Grants Commission (UGC) of India played the same role as the NSF (at least until as recently as 10 years ago). The UGC's budget in 2013--14 was about 100bn rupees. In 2016--17 (two years after the present political regime began), it was down to about 25bn rupees. In 2025, its budget is around 33bn rupees. Given that 100 rupees in 2015 are worth around 160 rupees in 2025, this is a ~80% reduction from 10 years ago.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 14 2025 at 18:44):What is this doing to research in India? I had no idea the current government had these same anti science tendencies; out of thin air I would have guessed Hindutva would be into glorified Indian science.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 14 2025 at 18:46):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Without wishing to (explicitly) incite anything, how much would more will it take before people in the US start physically resisting what's happening?
I was thinking of storming the Capitol but then I realized I’m not sure whom to punch to cause funds to keep flowing in a promised direction.
Chaitanya Leena Subramaniam (Feb 14 2025 at 19:07):Kevin Carlson said:
What is this doing to research in India? I had no idea the current government had these same anti science tendencies; out of thin air I would have guessed Hindutva would be into glorified Indian science.
I'm not best-placed to answer this, not having lived or worked in India for over 10 years.
That being said, from what I hear, the situation is pretty grim---I've heard of people having to subscribe to questionable political agendas in order to receive, or to continue to receive, funding for research. Also from what I hear, Hindutva is more into glorifying the "alternative reality" of ancient Indian science --- the work of a surgeon or astronomer from 2000 years ago is more important than one from 20 years ago.
All of this is anecdotal.
It should be noted that some of the budget previously allocated to the UGC has been diverted to a couple of newly set up institutions whose purported goal is to replace the UGC (why it needed replacing is unclear --- the reasons stated range from "inefficiency" to "promoting radical leftism"). This has led to a lot of reshuffling of people with the power to decide what kind of research gets funded (perhaps the actual reason for the creation of these institutions?).
Kevin Carlson (Feb 14 2025 at 19:20):Chaitanya Leena Subramaniam said:
Kevin Carlson said:
Also from what I hear, Hindutva is more into glorifying the "alternative reality" of ancient Indian science --- the work of a surgeon or astronomer from 2000 years ago is more important than one from 20 years ago.
Ah, that's clarifying.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 14 2025 at 19:22):It seems very easy to imagine this administration similarly trying to strangle the NSF as a tool of our analogue of the Indian Congress (but under the banner of ending the promotion of neo-Marxism etc) and partly replace it with an "anti-woke" science agency, which would naturally also turn out far more political than the NSF.
John Baez (Feb 14 2025 at 22:00):I've been looking at this list of other math grants that supposedly have appeared on Ted Cruz's list of "woke DEI grants". I've checked to see if they're actually on the spreadsheet, and I can't find the one on "elliptic and hyperbolic differential equations", but I can find some others.
Here's one based in La Jolla, California which is somewhat connected to category theory, but mainly homotopy theory:
COMPUTATIONS IN CLASSICAL AND MOTIVIC STABLE HOMOTOPY THEORY -ALGEBRAIC TOPOLOGY IS A FIELD OF MATHEMATICS THAT INVOLVES USING ALGEBRA AND CATEGORY THEORY TO STUDY PROPERTIES OF GEOMETRIC OBJECTS THAT DO NOT CHANGE WHEN THOSE OBJECTS ARE DEFORMED. A CENTRAL CHALLENGE IS TO CLASSIFY ALL MAPS FROM SPHERES TO OTHER SPHERES, WHERE TWO MAPS ARE CONSIDERED EQUIVALENT IF ONE CAN BE DEFORMED TO THE OTHER. THE EQUIVALENCE CLASSES OF THESE MAPS ARE CALLED THE HOMOTOPY GROUPS OF SPHERES, AND COLLECTIVELY THEY FORM ONE OF THE DEEPEST AND MOST CENTRAL OBJECTS IN THE FIELD. HISTORICALLY, MUCH IMPORTANT THEORY HAS ARISEN OUT OF ATTEMPTS TO COMPUTE MORE HOMOTOPY GROUPS OF SPHERES AND UNDERSTAND PATTERNS WITHIN THEM. THIS PROJECT INVOLVES FURTHERING KNOWLEDGE OF THE HOMOTOPY GROUPS OF SPHERES, USING OLD AND NEW TECHNIQUES AS WELL AS COMPUTER CALCULATIONS. THE PROJECT ALSO INVOLVES STUDYING AN ANALOGUE OF THESE GROUPS IN ALGEBRAIC GEOMETRY; THIS FALLS UNDER A RELATIVELY NEW AND ACTIVELY DEVELOPED AREA CALLED MOTIVIC HOMOTOPY THEORY, WHICH APPLIES TECHNIQUES IN ALGEBRAIC TOPOLOGY TO STUDY ALGEBRAIC GEOMETRY. THE BROADER IMPACTS OF THIS PROJECT CENTER AROUND SUPPORTING THE LOCAL MATHEMATICS COMMUNITY THROUGH MENTORING AND PROMOTING DIVERSITY. THE PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR WILL HELP BUILD THE NASCENT HOMOTOPY THEORY COMMUNITY AT THE UNIVERSITY AND PROMOTE WOMEN AND MINORITIES IN THE SUBJECT THROUGH SEMINAR ORGANIZATION AND MENTORING. ONE OF THE MAIN PLANNED PROJECTS IS A LARGE-SCALE EFFORT TO COMPUTE THE HOMOTOPY GROUPS OF SPHERES AT THE PRIME 3 IN A RANGE, USING OLD AND NEW TECHNIQUES SUCH AS THE ADAMS-NOVIKOV SPECTRAL SEQUENCE AS WELL AS INFINITE DESCENT MACHINERY. THIS WORK WILL BE AIDED BY COMPUTER CALCULATIONS, WHICH SHORT-CIRCUITS SOME OF THE TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED IN PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS. ANOTHER MAIN GROUP OF PROJECTS CONCERNS COMPUTING THE ANALOGUE OF THE STABLE HOMOTOPY GROUPS OF SPHERES IN THE WORLD OF R-MOTIVIC HOMOTOPY THEORY. THIS REPRESENTS A CONTINUATION OF PRIOR WORK OF THE PI AND COLLABORATOR; THE PLAN IS TO SUPPLEMENT THE TECHNIQUES USED IN THAT WORK WITH COMPUTER CALCULATIONS AND A NEW TOOL, THE SLICE SPECTRAL SEQUENCE. A THIRD PROJECT CONCERNS THEORY AND SPECTRAL SEQUENCE COMPUTATIONS AIMED AT COMPUTING THE COHOMOLOGY OF PROFINITE GROUPS SUCH AS SPECIAL LINEAR GROUPS AND MORAVA STABILIZER GROUPS. THIS AWARD REFLECTS NSF'S STATUTORY MISSION AND HAS BEEN DEEMED WORTHY OF SUPPORT THROUGH EVALUATION USING THE FOUNDATION'S INTELLECTUAL MERIT AND BROADER IMPACTS REVIEW CRITERIA.
Perhaps mercifully, the PI's names are not listed in the spreadsheet. If they were, I can imagine Trumpies harrassing these people online. Any idea who this is?
Joe Moeller (Feb 14 2025 at 22:51):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Without wishing to (explicitly) incite anything, how much would more will it take before people in the US start physically resisting what's happening?
It's very difficult to figure out exactly where all the lines are. The first thing to consider is that the US has some unique features, obvious, but worth listing:
John Baez (Feb 14 2025 at 23:16):I agree with Joe. So far the most important resistance is coming from judges staying or overturning the Trump administration's actions. That's how people got their NSF grants back, for example.
However, there were coordinated protests in all 50 states on February 6th, and there's a Wikipedia article detailing them:
The same organization is organizing protests in all 50 states on President's Day, February 17th. I wouldn't be surprised if these keep getting bigger. I think in March there's a planned "don't show up to work" day, but I'm not finding what I read about that.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 14 2025 at 23:30):All of which is well and good, though I probably wouldn’t call any of it “physical resistance”.
John Baez (Feb 14 2025 at 23:34):Right. I'm not sure exactly what Morgan was talking about - maybe fired federal employees going limp as security guards drag them out of the office, or people resisting arrest from ICE agents? It's true I haven't heard of that going on.
John Baez (Feb 14 2025 at 23:37):When a security guard kept congresspeople from entering the Department of Education, they did not physically force their way in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWwu5YZS28Y
Joe Moeller (Feb 14 2025 at 23:40):John Baez said:
Right. I'm not sure exactly what Morgan was talking about - maybe fired federal employees going limp as security guards drag them out of the office, or people resisting arrest from ICE agents? It's true I haven't heard of that going on.
Of course, certain acts of resistance are better kept out of broadcast.
John Baez (Feb 14 2025 at 23:41):The best way to resist arrest is to be somewhere else when they're trying to arrest you.
Cole Comfort (Feb 15 2025 at 08:11):I find it hard to believe that the research itself is "woke" in any way. It is likely that it got flagged for that one passage.
But it is possible that there is something even more sinister going on and the executive has investigated the sexual orientation, political opinions, etc. of grant holders in order to try to purge them from academia. This happened to communists and socialists in Canada and the United States not so long ago. Certainly, I wouldn't put it past them if they had the ability.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 15 2025 at 08:35):I would be shocked if they worked that hard (it looks more like they ran a query for all grants containing the word “equity”) although it’s certainly worth keeping the possibility in mind.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 16 2025 at 10:05):What I'd like to see is a list of the grants in maths that didn't end up in this database. I saw people saying things like including a sentence or two about running a workshop to which underrepresented people will be particularly invited is something that everyone had to include. But if this were true, every single grant would have ended up in this database. This cannot be true, right? I suspect we would have heard if every mathematics grant, nay, nearly every grant across all of academia (save, say, parts of it that are fairly resistant to having "DEI boilerplate", as I imagine economics might be), was suddenly cancelled by the move.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 16 2025 at 10:13):I've seen some other vaguely DEI-relevant statements from other grants, and a number of them really are almost analogous to "we will run a workshop in a poor district that hasn't got to see this stuff before, to encourage students to study maths". Except instead of school students, it's grad students or ECRs, and instead of "poor district" it's a different group with fewer chances in the past.
Zoltan A. Kocsis (Z.A.K.) (Feb 16 2025 at 15:06):@David Michael Roberts:
(This comes from public sources and conversations with friends who have lived and worked in the U.S. I am Australian and have never worked in the U.S., so it's possible that I missed or misunderstood something)
The Cruz press release says the list covers nearly 10% of grants approved in the past four years.
It's true that having a "Broader Impacts" section is required by the NSF. This works almost the same way as the National Interest Test in our ARC grant proposals: it explains how the project will provide environmental, social, or cultural benefits beyond directly advancing knowledge in the field.
Expanding science participation among underrepresented groups counts as a broader impact. Despite what the extreme right claims, this does not mean projects without a direct focus on these groups lose funding. It just is (should I say, used to be? ) one specific way in which a project can have broader impact. E.g. if your research outputs will help save birds from oil spills, that's definitely broader impact, even though it has nothing to do with underrepresented groups. I think the people you read might have confused "including a broader impact statement was mandatory" with "including a sentence or two about underrepresented people was mandatory" (or chose to conflate them for some reason).
It looks like they selected all grants whose broader impact included specific actions benefiting certain underrepresented groups (not veterans, not disabled people, but ethnic minorities, women, etc.). This would not lead to all grants being proscribed, but may plausibly affect 10% of them. It's less likely (not that I would put it above them) that they cherrypicked specific PIs that they personally wanted to inconvenience. I think at this point they're happy to inconvenience anyone who they perceive as a potential opponent.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 16 2025 at 20:16):Thanks, Zoltan.
John Baez (Feb 17 2025 at 04:59):Cole Comfort said:
I find it hard to believe that the research itself is "woke" in any way. It is likely that it got flagged for that one passage.
But it is possible that there is something even more sinister going on and the executive has investigated the sexual orientation, political opinions, etc. of grant holders in order to try to purge them from academia.
Please don't give Ted Cruz's staff more credit than they deserve. They did a naive text search on grant proposals, and didn't check the results:
A quote:
I saw many scientists complain that the projects from their universities that made Cruz’s list were unrelated to wokeness. This seemed like a surprising failure mode, so I decided to investigate. The Commerce Department provided a link to their database, so I downloaded it, chose a random 100 grants, read the abstracts, and rated them either woke, not woke, or borderline.
Of the hundred:
40% were woke
20% were borderline
40% weren’t woke
This is obviously in some sense a subjective determination, but most cases weren’t close - I think any good-faith examination would turn up similar numbers.
Why would a list of woke grants have so many non-woke grants in it? After reading the hundred abstracts, I found a clear answer: people inserted a meaningless sentence saying “this could help women and minorities” into unrelated grants, probably in the hopes of getting points with some automated filter.
For example, from Grant 1731:
New Security Exploit in Energy Harvesting Systems and Its Countermeasures: An Energy Harvesting System (EHS) has emerged as an alternative to battery-operated Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Instead of using a battery, EHS self-powers its device by collecting ambient energy from external sources such as radio frequency, WiFi, etc. However, since such ambient energy sources are unreliable, their resulting power is inherently unstable and often goes out. To address the problem, EHS leverages a capacitor as an energy buffer and computes when the capacitor secures a sufficient amount of energy, i.e., capacitors are at the heart of any EHS devices. Unfortunately, capacitors can be unreliable in the presence of frequent power failure across which they continuously charge and discharge, losing their original capacitance over time. More importantly, attackers can exploit the capacitor reliability issue to cause incorrect outputs or degrade the quality of service in targeted EHS devices. To this end, this research project focuses on investigating attack surfaces and designing cost-effective countermeasures. The project outcome will lay the foundation for batteryless Internet of Things services by maintaining their quality of service and security. The project also aims to integrate research findings into undergraduate teaching and promote equitable outcomes for women in computer science through K-12 outreach program.
Did you catch the last sentence?
The project also aims to integrate research findings into undergraduate teaching and promote equitable outcomes for women in computer science through K-12 outreach program.
Some version of this sentence was in most of the nonwoke grants that made it into Cruz’s database. They promised to investigate some totally normal scientific topic, and then at the end they said somehow it would cause equity for women and minorities. I assume somebody told them that if they didn’t include this sentence, the Biden NSF would ding them for not having enough equity impact.
Typical examples include:
We will do outreach, and probably some of it will inspire underrepresented minorities to go into STEM.
We will employ undergraduates or PhD students, and probably some of them will be underrepresented minorities.
People will benefit from our work, and probably some of the beneficiaries will be underrepresented minorities.
This was probably 90% of the false positives. But there were other categories, including grants that accidentally used scientific terms that had alternative woke meanings. For example, Grant 1424:
Cis-Regulatory Basis of Developmental Plasticity and Growth in the Development and Evolution of Beetle Horns, a Class of Highly Diversified Weapons - This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY22, integrative research investigating the rules of life governing interactions between genomes, environment and phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. How organisms develop is regulated through the interactions of genes and environmental conditions like nutrition. Gene regulation (turning genes "on" or "off") therefore is an important point of control for many aspects of development, such as growth. Further, when gene regulation is modified by evolution, it can lead to the emergence of new traits. Yet, exactly how gene regulation is controlled is not fully understood. The fellow will research horned beetles, which are well known for their diverse forms of environment-dependent development, in order to understand how environment affects gene regulation to promote diversity.
This one gets off to a rocky start by mentioning the word “cis” (a cis-regulatory pathway is when genes regulate the expression of other genes on the same DNA molecule). Then it ends with the words “promote diversity” - in context referring to how genes promote a diversity of beetle phenotypes, but probably this looks bad in a simple CTRL+F search.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Feb 17 2025 at 08:48):Yes, I think that supposing a politician had invested any time to actually read any of the grant proposals in this list is extremely generous.
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 17 2025 at 09:22):John Baez said:
Of the hundred:
40% were woke
20% were borderline
40% weren’t woke
This would be so funny if it wasn't so depressingly fascist
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 17 2025 at 09:23):and surely the inclusion criteria are vague and loose by design, they rather have people bend the knee for survival than miss someone they want kick out
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 17 2025 at 09:26):also, the fascist definition of 'degenerate' people/science/art is deliberately vague because it simply coincides with the complement of what people in power believe in/need to keep staying in power...
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 17 2025 at 12:24):John Baez said:
A quote:
Why would a list of woke grants have so many non-woke grants in it? After reading the hundred abstracts, I found a clear answer: people inserted a meaningless sentence saying “this could help women and minorities” into unrelated grants, probably in the hopes of getting points with some automated filter.
This. My question is: Do you think this was right in the first place? To me, it seems that the general idea of 'having to align with/subscribe to some political program/agenda/topic to get money' is shortsighted, and basically wrong. It has no political effect really, as a lot of people will squeeze whatever fashionable opinion in to get extra points, without caring an inch about it. It also has no positive long-term incentive as in doing so, one has to factor in that the political climate may shift and said stuff will inevitably backfire.
I think it would be much better for academics, institutions, universities and the entire research ecosystem if math grants would be about maths, and maths only. This said I clearly don't agree with Trump's policies even a little bit (I can't believe I have to write it explicitly), but at least I hope people will be mindful about the consequences of squeezing politics into anything the next time they have to submit some application.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 17 2025 at 12:27):To me (a non-American, very much non-concerned with America's internal state of affairs) the worst outcome of 'squeezing politics into everything and bringing the country to the brink of a civil war' is that now Americans have managed to elect a guy which is carrying out the worst foreign policy since pretty much forever (yes, way worse than Kissinger, incredibly!), and America's historical allies (as we Europeans are) will suffer the biggest consequences of this.
Ryan Wisnesky (Feb 17 2025 at 18:37):certainly value statements have always been controversial: https://archive.is/Rsoqw (links to non-paywall version of (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/hypocrisy-mandatory-diversity-statements/674611/)
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 22:46):Allow me temporarily to play some kind of devil's advocate. In Australia, we don't have an NSF, we have the Australian Research Council, which is something like the complement of the NIH - it covers all non-clinical basic/fundamental research. So you have maths and physics and chemistry and engineering and history and philosophy and .... all funded by the same body. One of the things that is necessary to do is add some statement about the benefit to Australia more broadly rather than just one's own field. It used to be worse (imposed by the centre-right government of the time) in that it was a non-negligible part of the process, even if relatively small.
This part of the grant has to be reflected in the one-paragraph public summary, which is the analogue of the stuff we are seeing above from the NSF grants.
So you get inanities like "This will have benefits within mathematics and also in physics/chemistry in the long run." in a grant about tensor categories (this is a small one, because the people applying are big shots are half of them outside Australia) or "Expected outcomes include flexible techniques for constructing twisted algebras for use further along the research pipeline, and cross-pollination of ideas within mathematics. Benefits include enhanced international collaboration and increased Australian capacity in pure mathematics, particularly algebra and operator algebras." on a grant linking categories and operator algebras. You cannot get away from including this, it's not a matter of some kind of vague social expectation. Here's one on a mathematics of string theory grant: "Significant benefits include bringing leading international researchers to Australia, cutting-edge research outcomes and research training in high-profile international collaborations."
This is to my mind one of the silliest parts of the application, because nearly everyone in pure maths has to put in some bland slop, because there almost always simply isn't anything that fits the bill. These 'benefit statements' are so small because the whole piece looks like this:
Character sheaves and Langlands duality. In the recent years a large part of mathematics has been driven by the Langlands program. The aim of work proposed is to contribute to this program from our unique point of view. The expected outcomes include a comprehensive understanding of character sheaves and how they apply to longstanding difficult problems in mathematics. In addition to addressing fundamental questions in mathematics and expanding our understanding, the research program connects Australia to the most exciting recent mathematical developments thus benefiting Australian researchers and students. The project will also train highly qualified individuals who can make significant impact on science, industry, technology, and economy through their specialised skills.
These paragraphs are what the Government Minister in charge of the ARC in principle could look at before giving the final approval to the awarding of the grants. Thankfully this is not the process any more, but it used to be the Minister could veto grants based on the short paragraph as I quoted. And people in the humanities whose research was niche sometimes did (!)
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 22:48):However, it is probably the case that having something like this keeps people on their toes and makes them think about, at least for a moment, potential benefits to Australia, and see if they can say anything at all that the taxpayer footing the bill would feel is some epsilon of justification.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 22:51):Note that for the Australian system you don't actually have to go and give public lectures, or write a book, or go and teach poor kiddies in a local high school about how maths is useful to study. The point is to specify what benefit the research itself will bring.
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:03):do you prefer to believe the evaluators believed in the slop, or they completely understood it was just slop, but preserved the tradition?
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:04):what was the saying, the king is naked...
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:06):To return to the main topic here, I repeat my statement that I'd like to see some grant descriptions, if there are any, along the lines of the above that in their broader impacts statement say nothing about side-benefits that might be aligned with DEI purposes. I suspect there are some, which if so would give the lie to the claim that everyone has to include DEI stuff. If they did, there'd be no NSF grants left under the current process. So if it isn't required, one might ask why people include a statement like "my side-channel advocacy for underrepresented groups..."
If it isn't required by the NSF in some vague way, then it is at most something like a social pressure, or perhaps people gaming the system in the same way that people puff up their college admissions ("I spent a summer digging wells in Africa for poor villages while teaching the kids to read")
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:06):To be clear, I don't agree with mandated political loyalty stuff in grant applications.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:07):fosco said:
do you prefer to believe the evaluators believed in the slop, or they completely understood it was just slop, but preserved the tradition?
Who do you think the evaluators are? For whom is the "wider benefits" statement written?
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:09):ah, I have no idea; in a functional, rational system, mathematicians would evaluate mathematicians, and not too far from their field of specialization; this is not always possible, but I have seen something on the lines of pure maths proposals evaluated by biologists.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:09):I listen to Sean Carroll's podcast episode on the affair, and he outlined at least part of the assessment process. As in Australia, academics play a huge role, if not at minimum the vast majority, in assessing grants. If the "wider benefits" statement is written for them, then one is only persuading one's colleagues, not shadowy government employees filtering grants for sufficiently "woke" text
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:10):In Australia, the panels are fairly broad, because the funding body is so broad. Maths usually gets lumped in with physics, but there are mathematicians on the panel.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:11):But in the NSF I am given to understand that the panels are actually rather focused.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:13):You can see here a timeline of upcoming panels, and they are very narrow in scope: https://www.nsf.gov/events/proposal-review-panels
Eg:
and there's three different panels for maths down the page...
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:13):So I believe mathematicians are evaluating mathematicians, here
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:14):good, but then, why the inanities?
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:14):there must be something I am failing to understand
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:14):https://www.nsf.gov/funding/merit-review#nsfs-proposal-review-process-2fb
tells me
Typically, NSF program officers identify at least three external reviewers, who are experts in the fields represented by the proposal, to review the proposal. The review may be conducted by ad hoc reviewers, a panel of experts, or a combination of both.
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:17):David Michael Roberts said:
So if it isn't required, one might ask why people include a statement like "my side-channel advocacy for underrepresented groups..."
if the sidetrack about evaluation process feels off-topic the question "why the slop, if we all know and agree it's slop?" applies also here.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:18):Well, there are some options: people really do keenly support and believe the stuff they write (this would be true for some proportion, and it may well be a rather large proportion); people are not opposed to the general idea of addressing things like the extreme gender imbalance in the field, and so will go along with any suggestions or encouragements or social norms that lead to inclusivity-related comments (this would be another reasonable chunk of people, I guess); people don't care either way, but are willing to play the game for the purposes of boosting their chances (again, we are pushing towards most people, once the previous groups are taken into account); and then people who don't like it, but will grit their teeth and do it; people who don't like it (or maybe just don't care) and won't do it.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:19):If there are grants without even a DEI-lite statement that get funded, then of the above groups, there must be some in the last one that get funded.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:20):We are not working with complete data. Having all the Ctrl-F-for-buzzwords grants in front of us, it looks like there's some huge mandate to include such things. But what if this were only 10% of maths grants? What if 75% of maths grants didn't include DEI-adjacent phrases and words?
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:21):With my breakdown of different groups of applicants, maybe the keen people are only a minority, and everyone else just finds other "broader impacts" to talk about.
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:22):David Michael Roberts said:
We are not working with complete data. Having all the Ctrl-F-for-buzzwords grants in front of us, it looks like there's some huge mandate to include such things. But what if this were only 10% of maths grants? What if 75% of maths grants didn't include DEI-adjacent phrases and words?
indeed, I'd like to know as well (and I tried to scrape the xlsx gigantic file but desisted because, heh, better things to do with my day)
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:22):What if only 25% of grant applications mention what you are describing as slop? How is this some kind of problem like the people stopping grants want everyone to think?
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:23):The narrative is very different depending on the baseline numbers.
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:25):I agree -as much as I agree that the slop should be written, and evaluated, by machines, leaving mathematicians to evaluate the mathematics.
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:26):and by slop I don't mean DEI-keywords... I just mean "boilerplate text that has to be there lest bureaucrats be angered"
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:26):Being at such a distance, and never having applied for an NSF grant (but I have twice applied for an ARC grant here in Australia, and been in conversations around applying for funding for a conference), I also have no idea about the process. Maybe the assessment criteria that expert assessors are given says they must look for social impacts like DEI-related stuff and give a mark on these. I don't know. But I'm not going to assume I know how widespread such statements are.
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:26):after all it's 2025; we have technology whose best use is generate boilerplate text....
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:27):Oh, the boilerplate stuff is painful, I agree. I'd rather not have to say things about how category theory or higher geometry is going to benefit Australia, but I appreciate why people asking for taxpayer money should at least try to think about it, even if the answer is inane.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:28):It's almost like there's a canonical answer for all pure maths in that respects, and all the panel people know it, but ultimately these paragraphs get released to the public, and worse, politicians, who want every excuse to question the value for money for the Australian public in general.
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:28):David Michael Roberts said:
Oh, the boilerplate stuff is painful, I agree. I'd rather not have to say things about how category theory or higher geometry is going to benefit Australia, but I appreciate why people asking for taxpayer money should at least try to think about it, even if the answer is inane.
Certainly! Here's an itemized list explaining how tensor categories can benefit the flora and fauna of the southern emisphere
John Baez (Feb 18 2025 at 04:01):@David Michael Roberts
We are not working with complete data. Having all the Ctrl-F-for-buzzwords grants in front of us, it looks like there's some huge mandate to include such things. But what if this were only 10% of maths grants? What if 75% of maths grants didn't include DEI-adjacent phrases and words?
I don't know the numbers, but in that blog article I quoted, Scott Alexander concluded with this remark:
Some people are saying “Well it still seems bad that 40% of Biden-era science was woke.” No! This post just finds that 40% of the science that Ted Cruz flagged as woke was actually woke. I think this works out to 2-3% of all Biden-era science.
Regardless of whether we accept Alexander's concept of "wokeness", I think this means only a small fraction of NSF grants included DEI language or other language that got flagged by Ted Cruz's keyword search.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 18 2025 at 04:10):OK, so if I haven't made a mistake, and working with a round figure in the middle of 2-3%, does this mean something like 8% of grants were flagged as having key words that triggered the anti-DEI warning bells? That's not too far off from the smaller figure I mentioned:
We are not working with complete data. Having all the Ctrl-F-for-buzzwords grants in front of us, it looks like there's some huge mandate to include such things. But what if this were only 10% of maths grants? What if 75% of maths grants didn't include DEI-adjacent phrases and words?
Obviously extrapolating from all-NSF to just maths is going to not be exact, but as a prior estimate, this means in the ballpark of only 10% of successful NSF maths grants invoked some kind of DEI. I presume that the people who wrote these take such initiatives seriously, and only a tinier fraction again of them would be either feeling pressured to include such a statement against their general judgement, to either game the system or for fear of reprisal.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 18 2025 at 04:21):If these are the kinds of figures we are talking about, there are other much more plausible explanations for the presence of DEI-related statements (and pretty soft ones, at that) in grant applications than "forced to do so otherwise No Grant For You!"
John Baez (Feb 18 2025 at 06:06):Right, I agree with your conclusion: if only a small fraction, say 10%, of successful NSF grant applications mention DEI and other phrases that make Cruz see red, this language is not required to get a grant. And this suggests that people who do include this language actually mean it.
Retreating from generalizations to the initial case at hand, I'm pretty sure that Emily Riehl does indeed advocate diversity, equity and inclusion in mathematics. I gather this both from her many public statements and the fact that in her grant proposal she mentions serving on the DEI board at Banff (the math research station in Canada).
David Michael Roberts (Feb 18 2025 at 06:29):And, might I add, serving on an advisory board is the kind of activity that academics tend to do anyway (not dissimilar from being a journal editor, broadly speaking), and not something that grant money goes to.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 18 2025 at 06:31):I of course appreciate that "nuance" like this was not exercised by the people doing a Ctrl-F on the spreadsheet of all grants and their descriptions...
Kevin Carlson (Feb 18 2025 at 07:58):It looks like a detail missing here is that NSF grants require a Broader Impacts statement, and one of the official ways in which you can satisfy this is by diversifying the STEM workforce. This is the basic pull factor leading to many grants including DEI-related statements, especially in pure math where immediate broader impacts are less plausible.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 18 2025 at 07:59):The ways you can have broader impacts are listed here. So far, “Inclusion” is still on the list!
John Baez (Feb 18 2025 at 08:01)::shh: Cruz's team was apparently only looking at some sort of abstract in the grant proposals.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 18 2025 at 08:02):Right; I guess these abstracts probably often contain words like “equity” because the associated broader impacts statements focus on “Inclusion”.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 09:59):Ok, the problem of having a 'broader impact statement' is clearly a top-down one: Since in the end a good chunk of grant money is taxpayer money, higher up in the political foodchain people need a way to justify the expense. "My grant application is good for nothing aside for marginal improvement in a god forsaken field" makes it difficult to justify the budget expenditure over the years.
Still, a rational government would allocate money separating it in various classes: Something along the lines of "actual practical impact", "important theoretical advancements" and "god knows, probably useless but worth a gamble". The funny thing is that we developed very good techniques to estimate the risk that comes attached with each category, so budgeting according to these lines is definitely possible.
In this case, someone that wants to submit a grant that is _purely_ theoretical wouldn't have to put any bs about impact in their application (be it broader impact, DEI stuff, "trump-will-like-it" stuff, applications that will never really exist and whatnot) and just focus on the actual problem they want money to solve.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 10:01):It seems to me that the thing academics complain about the most as of today is not just lack of funding but the incredible bureaucratic/administrative overload they need to cope with. "Just be honest" grants would probably do a better job in making this load at least an epsilon more bearable.
Ralph Sarkis (Feb 18 2025 at 10:38):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
a rational government would allocate money separating it in various classes
I don't agree with that. It seems the US government tried to encourage researchers to spend some of their time on achieving a broader impact, and I don't know why this would be considered irrational.
Instead of removing these statements, I would rather academics took them more seriously. Perhaps the institutions are not yet ready to enforce this.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 11:01):Ralph Sarkis said:
Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
a rational government would allocate money separating it in various classes
I don't agree with that. It seems the US government tried to encourage researchers to spend some of their time on achieving a broader impact, and I don't know why this would be considered irrational.
Instead of removing these statements, I would rather academics took them more seriously. Perhaps the institutions are not yet ready to enforce this.
It is irrational because asking "what is the real world impact?" about something that has multiple layers of separation from the real world is basically equivalent to ask people to do a future forecast 100 years from now.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 11:02):Grothendieck's mathematics is more than 50 years old at this point and only now we're BARELY starting to see it applied to non-pure-maths fields like Engineering. In asking researchers questions like those, you're only giving them the incentive to lie. This sort of questions creates nothing but noise, and since noise must still be produced somehow, it translates to more work for grant writers in exchange of, well, nothing.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 11:04):So what you have is a huge entropy increasing machine that takes people's time as input and produces a string of random characters as output. You may as well put them on a threadmill to disperse heat in the environment at this point. (Thinking more about this, it would be strictly better as one would probably get at least some minor health benefits in return)
Ralph Sarkis (Feb 18 2025 at 11:15):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
"what is the real world impact?" about something that has multiple layers of separation from the real world
The question does not seem to be "How is your research on, say, categories going to solve real world problems?", but rather "What other activities will you undertake, as a researcher, to contribute to the broader community?". At least that is what I understand from Emily Riehl's answer at the start of the thread.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 18 2025 at 11:19):I agree it's annoying, and I would prefer to not have to put some relatively shallow statement about the broader impact, but in Australia mathematicians kind have it sorted, with a true statement that indicates the benefit that is essentially so generic and indirect it can feel silly writing it. Something like "will benefit the country by building capacity in research and boost Australia's international standing" is true, barely, and requires very little thought. The people on the ARC panel assessing grants after the external expert reviewers have gone over them know that this is the best we can do.
It's different to the US system where it seems to be "you must add in something that will be a real-world benefit", as Ralph says.
I certainly can't make claims about if the system is sensible or not, but big string of posts above was just digging into the evidence and what it implied from a mere numbers game.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 12:54):Ralph Sarkis said:
but rather "What other activities will you undertake, as a researcher, to contribute to the broader community?".
To which my standard answer would be: How - the fuck - would this be relevant wrt my ability to research on infinity categories? :lol:
Josselin Poiret (Feb 18 2025 at 13:20):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
How - the fuck - would this be relevant wrt my ability to research on infinity categories? :lol:
except that your job is not just researching ∞-categories in a vacuum. it also entails participating in a community and nurturing it. how you interact and what impact you have on it is as important as the papers you put out. for example, you can take students, collaborate and organize events like seminars. the effects it will have on your research field cannot be understated
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 13:41):Josselin Poiret said:
Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
How - the fuck - would this be relevant wrt my ability to research on infinity categories? :lol:
except that your job is not just researching ∞-categories in a vacuum. it also entails participating in a community and nurturing it. how you interact and what impact you have on it is as important as the papers you put out. for example, you can take students, collaborate and organize events like seminars. the effects it will have on your research field cannot be understated
Yes, but this sort of impact has nothing to do with the impact evaluation metrics researchers are asked to answer in a grant. Note: They not only ask "how will your research impact your field of research?", which is a perfectly legit question which includes also what you're pointing out. They also ask things like "how will your research impact society, the country, politics, the galaxy and the whole universe timeline", which to be honest seems a bit too much and/or far-fetched to be of any relevance.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 13:44):Also, what if I do not want to impact the broader community with social activities, seminars and the like? What if I am a loner which is a great researcher but a terrible teacher? Why should I be forced to teach and/or to 'broaden the scope of my research grant application' if I just have a very relevant idea, a very well detailed program to carry it out, and a clear track record that shows I have the right skill set to be successful? The 'broader community' will still be able to read whatever papers come out of the grant, and benefit from it.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 13:45):I don't know, I keep thinking that the main purpose of a 'research grant' should be 'research'. There are a lot of important things that are very clearly not research, and they should deserve their own budget and application process. I just don't understand trying to conflate apples and pears under the same category.
fosco (Feb 18 2025 at 14:17):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
Also, what if I do not want to impact the broader community with social activities, seminars and the like? What if I am a loner which is a great researcher but a terrible teacher? Why should I be forced to teach and/or to 'broaden the scope of my research grant application' if I just have a very relevant idea, a very well detailed program to carry it out, and a clear track record that shows I have the right skill set to be successful? The 'broader community' will still be able to read whatever papers come out of the grant, and benefit from it.
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.01508 <- relevant
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Feb 18 2025 at 15:21):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
Also, what if I do not want to impact the broader community with social activities, seminars and the like? What if I am a loner which is a great researcher but a terrible teacher?
I don't know, I keep thinking that the main purpose of a 'research grant' should be 'research'. There are a lot of important things that are very clearly not research, and they should deserve their own budget and application process.
Grant applications are in many ways the only leverage that any external authority has over academics. There are extremely well-documented systemic problems in academia (because they're the problems most visible to academics, of course). If its participants aren't required to commit to improving things in one way or another in grant applications, there is no other way to inspire such commitments.
Relatedly, I can see why it's appealing to think of research in purely utilitarian terms (money goes in, research comes out), but academics are responsible for most of the things that happen in academia: we are the only people with the relevant knowledge to organise conferences, communicate our results, teach our specialised subjects, train students, coordinate with other researchers, assess others' research contributions... The systemic problems can only be addressed by acting to fulfill those responsibilities appropriately. As a fellow academic, let alone as a citizen, why should I tolerate you isolating yourself and doing research by yourself in a corner when there are so many other responsibilities to attend to?
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Feb 18 2025 at 15:39):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
We are the only people with the relevant knowledge to organise conferences, communicate our results, teach our specialised subjects, train students, coordinate with other researchers, assess others' research contributions...
Not all of these are inherent, by the way, it would improve things greatly if there was a separation of responsibilities beyond the purely bureaucratic. In some rare places there are people who have the job of, say, teaching PhD students to write articles, and in some communities the conferences are big enough that there are dedicated roles (held by people who aren't actively doing research) for their organisation. But to the extent that researchers de facto share responsibilities with their peers beyond research, I apply my argument that no one should be exempt from them by default.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 17:29):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
Also, what if I do not want to impact the broader community with social activities, seminars and the like? What if I am a loner which is a great researcher but a terrible teacher?
I don't know, I keep thinking that the main purpose of a 'research grant' should be 'research'. There are a lot of important things that are very clearly not research, and they should deserve their own budget and application process.
Grant applications are in many ways the only leverage that any external authority has over academics. There are extremely well-documented systemic problems in academia (because they're the problems most visible to academics, of course). If its participants aren't required to commit to improving things in one way or another in grant applications, there is no other way to inspire such commitments.
Relatedly, I can see why it's appealing to think of research in purely utilitarian terms (money goes in, research comes out), but academics are responsible for most of the things that happen in academia: we are the only people with the relevant knowledge to organise conferences, communicate our results, teach our specialised subjects, train students, coordinate with other researchers, assess others' research contributions... The systemic problems can only be addressed by acting to fulfill those responsibilities appropriately. As a fellow academic, let alone as a citizen, why should I tolerate you isolating yourself and doing research by yourself in a corner when there are so many other responsibilities to attend to?
Because maybe i'm the only one that would be really able to tackle some question. Or maybe because I'm just a really, really bad teacher and everyone would be better off without me teaching
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 17:31):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
We are the only people with the relevant knowledge to organise conferences, communicate our results, teach our specialised subjects, train students, coordinate with other researchers, assess others' research contributions...
Not all of these are inherent, by the way, it would improve things greatly if there was a separation of responsibilities beyond the purely bureaucratic. In some rare places there are people who have the job of, say, teaching PhD students to write articles, and in some communities the conferences are big enough that there are dedicated roles (held by people who aren't actively doing research) for their organisation. But to the extent that researchers de facto share responsibilities with their peers beyond research, I apply my argument that no one should be exempt from them by default.
I agree that there should be a separation of concerns. That's precisely my point. BTW the "academics must take care of everything" is a rather new thing (it has become the status quo in the last 3 decades), and all academics are complaining about this because it overloads them administratively. It seems a net loss to me, which derives precisely from the Reaganian posture that Unis should be treated like they were companies, not the other way around.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 18 2025 at 18:14):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
..."god knows, probably useless but worth a gamble". The funny thing is that we developed very good techniques to estimate the risk that comes attached with each category, so budgeting according to these lines is definitely possible.
Fabrizio, I have no idea what you could mean by estimating the risk attached to a "...god knows..." grant, such as, presumably "I'm going to make progress with the theory of -cosmoses." Care to expand?
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 18:26):Sure. What I mean is that on one hand you have a bunch of taxpayer money that you need to allocate. On the other hand you have a bunch of projects that need resources to be carried over. If the funding requested is more than the money available (read: always), you have the typical allocation problem, namely: what do I fund?
From the grant-giving perspective (the organism allocating funding), one could rank projects according to various parameters: One parameter could be impact (how good does the project do?). The other could be risk (what are the probabilities that the project actually delivers?). If you go back a few years (ex-post reasoning is obviously easier), on one hand of the spectrum you have, for instance, building a hospital (decent positive impact, all things considered low risk). On the other hand of the spectrum you have funding AI research (potentially huge impact, very high risk it goes nowhere).
In absolute layman terms, the higher the risk, the less percentage of the budget should go into it (or the highest the need to hedge the high-risk allocation with something else). What matters is that budget allocation according to risk is one of the most studied fields of practical economics, and we have all sort of techniques to allocate funding to maximize impact when risk is known.
...The other most studied field of practical economics is probably 'risk assessment'. There are, especially, a lot of techniques to assess the risk of projects that have a potentially big, but really not-so-clear impact, like, for instance, the impact of some super novel category theory to some field of engineering in n decades.
All in all what I'm saying is that we have developed, over the last 5-6 decades or so, a lot of tools to be really good at allocating budgets for research, and to evaluate research for what it is, without the need of any far-fetched, hyperbolic claims. Deciding not to walk the rational path when it comes to this is a choice. A choice that many governments do, and that I personally find borderline criminal.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 18 2025 at 18:51):Thanks. The thing is, the words you say are profoundly divorced from my understanding of the matter. How in the world would you assess the risk of a category theory project, concretely? I have literally no idea how you could possibly even begin to do so in a way that would track at all with the truth, so it’s quite shocking to hear that apparently this is a solved problem. If it is, then how come all grants are instead allocated using profoundly insufficient heuristics of, essentially, legible prestige and signaling of seriousness?
Kevin Carlson (Feb 18 2025 at 18:52):To be clear, if you could calculate the risk, I am sure there are great economic algorithms for budgeting. It would just be an ontologically shattering event for me to be convinced that you can actually calculate that risk.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 19 2025 at 00:23):To draw an analogy, many government (and other) funding agencies now require that the results of the research they fund ends up open access in some form, because the intellectual results are a public good, and shouldn't be monopolised by publishers. This is just a condition on accepting the funding. The work of open access advocates to directly persuade academics to sort out their own open access was at best a very limited success, so the focus switched to promoting the idea to funding bodies, who have slowly come around to the idea. The funding bodies hold the levers over academic behaviour, and so this has been a more effective tack.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 19 2025 at 00:27):Asking academics to make at minimum an effort to not exclude a subgroup of the population (aka taxpayers) from academic society (for whatever reason: implicit bias, entrenched culture etc etc), or at least consider making a minimum effort, or at least consider promising to probably make a minimum effort (which is what a number of these grants have), as part of getting access to taxpayer money, feels like a very small price to pay. No one seems to be putting a declaration to promise to be "woke" in front of people that must be signed to even enter the lottery that is grant application season, but perhaps its invisible to me, an outsider in another country.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 19 2025 at 00:36):Were this latter to be happening then I agree this is a rather disagreeable state of affairs. We in Australia have (nearly) had the reverse problem, with the centre-right (verging on neoliberal, I guess) government pushing for all publicly-funded research to be essentially focused towards immediate societal (read: economic) impact and industry engagement. Also, the success rates of funding a rather low. Sean Carroll mentioned a 50% success rate for the NSF funding panel he was on. For the ARC it's more like 16%, and even though there's no "pay for my summer salary, plz" effect here, universities (at least, research universities I am familiar with) compel people to apply for grants regularly as part of their KPIs; essentially, if you don't have one, you need to apply for one every year until you do. And these are hundred-page applications, and a real nightmare.
So imagine what it's like in pure maths where the government is pushing to try to only fund things that have immediate impact, but the universities push everyone to apply every year, and the successful grants are usually only those with a full professor on them, and maybe at best half a dozen get funded a year?
David Michael Roberts (Feb 19 2025 at 00:36):Anyway, this is getting a bit off -track, I should stop, I don't have more to add on the original topic. Just wanted to give some contrast.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 19 2025 at 07:09):Kevin Carlson said:
Thanks. The thing is, the words you say are profoundly divorced from my understanding of the matter. How in the world would you assess the risk of a category theory project, concretely? I have literally no idea how you could possibly even begin to do so in a way that would track at all with the truth, so it’s quite shocking to hear that apparently this is a solved problem. If it is, then how come all grants are instead allocated using profoundly insufficient heuristics of, essentially, legible prestige and signaling of seriousness?
No surprise, to everyone their job :joy: If you were to explain that thanks to calculus you can compute instant velocity of objects and whatnot to someone living in the 1400s, you'd be mistaken for a wizard as well. Let's just say that a lot of research around uncertainty has been produced by people in the business of making money. Does it always work? No, it works like 80% of the time in normal conditions. Still better than allocating budget following philosophy and ideology, tho.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 19 2025 at 07:16):Bayesian inversion too seems like magic to the uninitiated... In any case some efforts would be really low hanging fruits. Even feeding all the grants applications to an LLM together with outcomes and results and finding out which grants end up winning and which of those winning end up producing cited/impactful results would be really insightful or at least insightful. The overall lack of experimentation and willingness of improving things is the real depressing factor in all this.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 19 2025 at 08:07):Don’t worry, I haven’t mistaken you for a wizard…You keep asserting research exists you haven’t given any evidence exists, and then tossed off a suggestion that is both rather horrifying (let’s have the robots tell us which hidden variables in grant application text correlate with the h-index of resulting publications, that’s sure to fix science!) and itself contingent on assuming we even know what an impactful result is in a reasonable time horizon, which is precisely the question at issue. Respectfully, I’m going to go ahead and consider my ontology non-shattered.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 19 2025 at 10:57):Kevin Carlson said:
Don’t worry, I haven’t mistaken you for a wizard…You keep asserting research exists you haven’t given any evidence exists, and then tossed off a suggestion that is both rather horrifying (let’s have the robots tell us which hidden variables in grant application text correlate with the h-index of resulting publications, that’s sure to fix science!) and itself contingent on assuming we even know what an impactful result is in a reasonable time horizon, which is precisely the question at issue. Respectfully, I’m going to go ahead and consider my ontology non-shattered.
Sorry, I didn't understand that you wanted 'evidence' of the fact that - for instance - insurance companies work and don't usually go bankrupt. I can scavenge some papers if that's what you want.
I also never mentioned h-indexes explicitly, I don't hink they are a good metric. I merely said that there are probably _a lot_ of unexplored correlations between applications and outcomes which could be analyzed and studied, if only whoever decides on budget allocation had the will to do so. I am also convinced that the lack of will to do so may depend on the fact that when decision procedures are murky, decision makers have a better edge at inserting their own biases (and interests) into the process. I don't see this as a particularly efficient outcome, and rejecting tout court the posture that the actual system can (and should) be improved by, well, approaching the problem from a rational stance seems more like a religious opinion to me than anything else. I am also not interested in engaging in ideological conversations, so I'll shut up.
James Deikun (Feb 19 2025 at 12:58):Sufficient conditions for insurance being successful are:
Real world insurance typically adds:
to lower the insurer's risk further.
It is my understanding that the above conditions are how insurance actually functions. Insurers have failed and been bailed out on certain occasions when their "acts of god" clause was insufficiently comprehensive. (The phrase "too big to fail" may bring one such occasion to mind.) This is a far cry from saying quantifying risk is a solved problem.
I don't think this is a reason to abandon all attempts to improve the process of awarding grants, but the problem space is very different from insurance and there's no off-the-shelf solution.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 19 2025 at 16:22):Yeah, to be clear, of course we should try to improve the grant-making system. It’s just not possibly going to be by quantifying risk like an insurer at this point.
John Baez (Feb 20 2025 at 00:58):Oh-oh: Trump has just declared that mathematicians who get NSF grants can't work on homomorphisms! They can only work on heteromorphisms!
Kevin Carlson (Feb 20 2025 at 02:06):Even just morphisms are too wishy-washy, I’m sure. Which side are we on, anyway?