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I wonder if the same thing happened with--or is happening at--NSF? I know researchers that did not get funding for quantitative ecology fellowships or grants. After back channeling with program managers, it seems that using "diversity"--as in the quantitative ecological measures, metrics, or derived functional values--may have flagged proposals to be rejected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeta_diversity

The "lists" that were public of science grants identified as DEI absolutely indicated they were just doing a ctrl+f on diversity, women, race at times. Same went for removing people from government websites and so on.

Can never forget the Enola "Gay" https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/10/dei-enola-gay-wwii/

My guess is this will garner attention for use of AI — that's where my attention went as well initially. But there's another layer to this, which is whether a grant should be terminated just because it pertains to DEI, regardless of AI being involved or not.

My guess is you couldn't get a roomful of experts to agree on what "DEI" means; I doubt AI could do better, and even if it could, I'm not sure I'd want that to be the determining factor about whether it would get funded. To the extent it was, I'm not sure it would be a bad thing.

> My guess is you couldn't get a roomful of experts to agree on what "DEI" means

let's not pretend that anyone involved cares one bit

> But there's another layer to this, which is whether a grant should be terminated just because it pertains to DEI, regardless of AI being involved or not.

Another layer?

I think it's the same level of stupidity/shadiness.

I remember (the one time I snuck into NIPS) a buuunch of papers on "fairness", and it was basically: "We have decided that this input should not affect the outcome. Does it? If so, how?"

So that seems like a pretty good actual "what's DEI?" - Does race/gender/sexuality/etc affect some outcome? Should it? If it does affect it and shouldn't, what we can we do about it?

That said... yeah, not gonna get a room full of anyone to agree on that. Starting with that "should".

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>My guess is you couldn't get a roomful of experts to agree on what "DEI" means;

You don't need to, it's clearly defined within existing legal frameworks.

A lot of people including the current administration seem to believe it means "racism against white men," but those people are simply wrong.

If you can use a criteria to finance academia [1] you can use the reverse to define what DEI is. Every major corporation had DEI departments and yet it doesn't exist, it's a ghost.

I really hope the backlash to this bullshit finally reaches europe.

Same song and dance for 14 years straight, there is no SJW you're just imagining them, it's just called being a decent human being, they say as they kick me repeatedly in the face.

[1] https://archive.is/UmkH3

It sounds like they stupidly did exactly what was stupidly expected.

That's like calling it just incompetence where it clearly is both incompetence and malice.

    def accept_grant(application):
        return random.choice([True, False])

The article is about grant termination, not the acceptance of applications.

turns out this function works just as well for that too

I think I'd have to reject it in review. The parameter is not used and should therefore be prepended with an underscore or literally be named "_" to signal such to a reader.

only 50% of the time

Is this the classic model?

No, that accepts far too many grants. You'd need to add weights=[1, 100] to it.

> We’ve mentioned Cavanaugh here before, for the time when he was head of the US Institute for Peace, and Elon and DOGE falsely labeled a guy who had worked for USIP a member of the Taliban, causing the actual Taliban to kidnap the guy’s family.

Sorry for the OT, but... what on earth?

Yeah the story linked there is absolutely nuts.

Why is this flagged?

They would prefer if you stop asking that question

Fun technical note:

>"Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. ”"

GPT models generate tokens from left to right, they are causal. That prompt causes the model to lock in to an answer and then generate the explanation after the fact. This is why you can sometimes see the failure mode "The answer is X because the answer can't be X so the answer is Y"

Asking for the Yes/No to be placed at the end would put the CoT before and generate 100% objectively better results.

I used to think prompt engineering was a bullshit term like you don't need to be trained at all to use this thing. But apparently you need to a little bit.

So if the idea alone that an application is fed into chatgpt isn't dumb enough, consider that they failed to even use chatgpt correctly, which apparently is a thing.

It matters less these days with the thinking models. They'll automatically inject some extra content before the answer for basically the same purpose. But if you're using something simpler with immediate responses - yeah, the order is important.

Were thinking models even already widely available when DOGE was doing its thing?

Simple, cheap and fast

"Simple, cheap, fast," and somewhere between inaccurate and wrong. From the article:

> To flag grants for their DEI involvement, Fox entered the following command into ChatGPT: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.” He then inserted short descriptions of each grant. Fox did nothing to understand ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” as used in the command or to ensure that ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” matched his own.

The culture warrior understanding of the term "DEI" does not reflect reality. The prompt is trash. Garbage in, garbage out.

This is somehow even stupider than similar reports of grants being canceled simply for containing specific keywords commonly used in scientific research but also on the culture warrior no-no list.

Women or minorities being there or being cared about is DEI.

Only men naturally matter. White men I mean. Only right wing white men, actually, bonus point if they are aggressive assholes. That makes them proper masculine.

In what way does ChatGPT’s understanding of the term DEI not reflect reality?

The pejorative sense of DEI has probably poisoned the training data. You might be able to prompt around it, but the existing prompt is pretty lazy.

the dataset is poisoned with a definition you disagree with

Agreement or disagreement are irrelevant if you're asking the LLM for something more precise than generalized racial grievance labeled by the public as DEI.

Newsflash: the definition is amorphous to justify whatever people want.

From the article:

> For example, the AI searches [purportedly related to DEI] flagged .... a film examining how the game of baseball was “instrumental in healing wounds caused by World War I and the 1980s economic standoff between the US and Japan,”

How at all is that DEI? (Surely that should be WWII, yes? The complaint also says "I".)

And, is this also DEI?

> another charting “the rise and reforms of the Native Americans boarding school systems in the U.S. between 1819 and 1934,”

American football would be impoverished without the contributions of Native Americans from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an experimental Native American boarding school.

Pratt, who founded the school, wrote "If all men are created equal, then why were blacks segregated in separate regiments and Indians segregated on separate tribal reservations? Why weren't all men given equal opportunities and allowed to assume their rightful place in society? Race became a meaningless abstraction in his mind." Is that also DEI?

Would you care to summarize what DEI means in reality?

In the sense that viewpoints of people that use the term DEI do not appear to reflect reality?

What kind of sentiment do you think you would find in the training material regarding the term DEI?

I wonder what the economic cost of DOGE basing policy entirely on whether something is DEI or not. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

That's going to be another big problem with AI. The same problem they have with developers.

Management: "We need to do X"

AI does X

Management: "It's not working"

AI: what do you mean? It does exactly what you asked.

Management: "I wanted it to do Y, and that's how you do it" (with Y having nothing to do with X whatsoever)

AI: ...

Management: I'm hiring the developers back ...

That has always been a thing since the invention of computers. The great thing about computers is that they do exactly what you ask them to do. The problem with computers is that they do exactly what you ask them to do.

from 1864:

> On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#:~:text=226-,P...

The board will solve this by replacing management with AI.

We're going to look back at the second Grump admin as what happens when society enthusiastically embraces ego-stroking hallucinations - from "magic computer" LLMs, hollow TV personalities, and of course good old combative dementia.

why have I not seen the butterfly meme yet

I hate it here

Can we please put these guys on trial for malfeasance?!??!?

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> Sure, right after Tim Waltz's trial for allowing billions of fraud

And the source is a random youtube video from a troll and the whitehouse.gov blogspam. Real smoking gun.

I mean a business registered to an address taking millions from government to provide child care. The address is boarded up, no children. All on video and public records for evidence.

What more do you want?

But that's not all, of course.

There were already successful prosecutions of fraudsters before the video made by the person you try so hard to discredit with 5-th grade tactic of throwing insults. What is ad hominem?

Lots more people were already arrested and lots of investigation have started as a result.

I lived in San Francisco, watching homeless problem becoming bigger and bigger. California spent billions supposedly fixing homelessness. Where did that money go?

California speed rail was supposed to be done in 2020 for $33 billion.

It's 2026. Newsom spent $15 billion and NOT A SINGLE TRACK is operational. Where did the money go? Who did the work and what were they doing for 18 years (it got approved in 2008). Fraud or gross incompetence? Either way, how is Newsom still in charge (and worse, running for President)?

I could go on but I'll wait for your "rebuttal" how convicting someone of fraud isn't really an indication that fraud happened or spending $15 billion achieving nothing is totally how non-fraudulent construction project work.

I'm not disputing there was fraud, I'm disputing your framing that nothing was being done about it, and Walz should be arrested.

I can't tell you about California. But when it comes to Minnesota, this was already a multi year investigation where Minnesota collaborated with the FBI. Nothing was "brought to light" by this video, the fraud was being investigated, and Trump was aware of it. Several names I've seen thrown around were people who are already convicted. You are acting like they were disinterested in investigating fraud entirely.

Nor did this happen in a vacuum. A lot of this came from emergency economic relief, like PPP funds. Both Trump and Biden weanened PPP oversight in favor of getting funds out quickly. When you do that, there is an understanding there will be some order of fraud.

The completely last minute decision of Trump to make a public spectacle of something he already knew about was just a power grab to justify the ICE surge, and an opportunity to demonize the people of the state. Anyone who hasn't drunk the Koolaid would understand that. That's why the white house site does not approach the fraud in a matter of fact way. It literally calls Walz "deranged."

And of course, that situation spawned the trolls, where people would make videos with a deluge of "facts", where one instance of legitimate fraud would be combined with a bunch of bullshit evidence to make it seem like the fraud is widespread and unstoppable without Trump's intervention. That's why they are throwing out completely random numbers for the scale of fraud.

Anyway, it's a legitimate issue with a lot of bipartisan factors that contributed to it, and could have been handled gracefully, but then it got turned into a political dick measuring contest in the name of retribution. Ironically Walz is still working with Trump on it.

Meanwhile Trump and his family is busy committing billions of fraud...

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Ironically... ChatGPT having such a positive attractor basin for DEI probably widened the net here tremendously.